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If Meta cannot freely exploit user data in the United States, Mark Zuckerberg is threatening to shut down its services in Europe.
Relegating Europe to the rank of a dictatorship in which Facebook and Instagram could not do business? This is what Mark Zuckerberg’s latest bet looks like after Meta’s stock market crash.
In its annual report to the SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission), the authority of the American financial markets, Meta warns that it could “ probably “no longer offer its” most important products and services like Instagram or Facebook, if the business is no longer allowed to use the current agreement template or an alternative. The latter refers to Meta’s ability to transfer users’ personal data from Europe to its servers in the United States.
In another statement, Meta insists on this point: the sharing of data between countries or regions of the world is crucial to offer our services and targeted advertising “. Remember that Meta’s business model is essentially based on its advertising, where Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and even Google have succeeded in diversifying their sources of income over the years.
What does Meta want to get?
This case is the consequence of the cancellation of the Privacy Shield by the European Court of Justice in 2020. This agreement was to regulate the transfer of data between the European Union and the United States, because it went against the GDPR. The latter provides that in order to allow a transfer of data, the country in question must offer the same level of protection of personal data as what the EU provides with the GDPR, but it was judged that this was not the case of the United States.
To carry out its data transfers, Meta uses the Privacy Shield, now canceled, and ” agreement templates “. These are carefully observed by the European Union. With this new blackmail move, Meta intends to obtain a new base on which to rely to allow the private data of its European users to be transferred and processed in the United States. The firm refuses to process them on European soil within the framework of the legislation provided for by the EU.
What is the threat weight?
Apart from the fact of no longer allowing Europeans to access applications such as Facebook and Instagram, Meta especially wants to put in the balance the hundreds of companies that use its services. In a response to City AM, Meta barely hides his blackmail: “ a lack of safe, secure and legal international data transfers would hurt the economy and hamper the growth of data-driven businesses in the EU, just as we seek to recover from Covid-19 »before driving the point home «limpact would be felt by companies large and small, across multiple sectors “.
But can we believe it?
Remember that if Meta has recently collapsed on the stock market, it is in particular because the group has for the first time lost users in its balance sheet. More precisely, it is a million daily users who no longer use the Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram services.
Europe represented 25% of turnover at the end of 2021 // Source: Meta
During the results for the last quarter of 2021, Meta announced that Europe represented $8.357 billion in revenue for Meta, nearly a quarter of the group’s total for 427 million users. monthly assets on Facebook. The average revenue per user on Facebook was $19.68 in Europe, only second to the United States and Canada at $60.57.
When we see the effect of the disappearance of a million users on the group’s results, can we really believe that Meta would be ready to close its services in Europe and thus deprive itself of millions of users? It seems inconceivable.
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