Under the impetus of the European Union, the Irish regulator has once again pinned WhatsApp for its management of personal data.
WhatsApp, a subsidiary of the digital juggernaut Meta, was fined 5.5 million euros on January 19, 2023 by the Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland.
After Facebook and Instagram, it’s WhatsApp’s turn
The DPC finds WhatsApp guilty of violating the privacy of its users. It requires the company that develops the instant messaging application to reassess the way in which it uses the personal data of its users for the purpose of improving the service.
The Irish authority, which can be compared to the CNIL in France, and which works closely with the European Union, had already imposed a fine of 390 million euros on Meta at the beginning of January for the exploitation Facebook and Instagram user data for advertising purposes.
The bill is therefore much lower for WhatsApp than for the other two major platforms owned by Meta, but the accumulation of fines could finally encourage the American group to reconsider its way of processing our personal information.
whatsapp is appealing
According to the order issued by the DPC, Meta must reassess the legal basis on which it relies to continue to serve targeted advertising through the analysis of the personal data of European consumers. The authority also ordered WhatsApp to comply within six months.
A spokesperson for WhatsApp has already announced that the firm will appeal this decision, as it had appealed a fine of 225 million euros imposed in September 2021 following an investigation launched in 2018 by the same DPC. The latter had concluded that WhatsApp did not comply with the GDPR and failed in its transparency obligations in terms of informing users about the processing of their data.
As reminded Reutersthe Irish regulator has already imposed a cumulative fine of 1.3 billion euros on Meta, and ten other investigations are currently underway into the practices of the social networking giant.
Source : Reuters
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