Bluff or real threat? In its annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the financial market regulator in the United States, the Meta group suggests that it could close Facebook and Instagram in Europe. Mark Zuckerberg’s company would like to be able to freely store the personal data of its European users in the United States. But for two years his ambitions have been thwarted by European Union legislation in this area, which is much less permissive than that of the United States.
In its report to the SEC, the company, which renamed itself in October, points in particular to the invalidation by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) of the Privacy Shield, which occurred in July 2020. This agreement between the European Union and the United States concerning the right to the protection of personal data had been negotiated between 2015 and 2016, i.e. before the entry into force in 2018 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The judgment of the CJEU therefore ruled that the Privacy Shield no longer offered adequate protection to European users of Meta services.
Already then the company had threatened to restrict its activities in Europe because of this decision. It was above all a question of underlining the importance for it of the data transfers from which it draws the main part of its income. But do without a market with more than 440 million inhabitants was unthinkable and it was not.
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Mark Zuckerberg, however, agitates this spectrum again. He makes it clear in his report that if a new framework is not adopted, his company will not be “probably better able to offer many of its most important products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in the EU”.
As in 2020, there is little, if any, chance that such a threat will be carried out. For Meta, it would mainly be a question of exerting pressure while the EU and the United States are currently negotiating a new version of the Privacy Shield which would be compliant with the GDPR. But while the social networking giant is going through one of the worst crises in its history, marked by a drop in its number of users in North America and a fall in the stock market, this threat is akin to a last-ditch coup.
In an attempt to clarify this issue as well as Meta’s intentions, the London business daily City AM contacted Meta’s head of international affairs and communications, Nick Clegg. The latter does not deny the importance of transfers of personal data to the United States, on the contrary. “A lack of transferring data in a safe and legal manner would hamper our economy,” he declares. But he also tries to link the fate of his company weighing 86 billion dollars in annual turnover to that of much smaller boxes, which would suffer as much as his if data transfers remained limited. “A small tech start-up in Germany would no longer be able to use a US-based cloud provider”, illustrates Clegg. Not sure that the argument convinces…