EU Data Watchdogs Ruling Sharpens Focus On Facebook, Big Tech

Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants could face more scrutiny and potential sanctions in the European Union after the bloc’s top court backed national privacy watchdogs to pursue them, even when they are not the lead regulators.

Consumer lobbying group BEUC welcomed Tuesday’s ruling by the EU Court of Justice (CJEU), which backed the right of national agencies to act, citing enforcement bottlenecks.

“Most Big Tech companies are based in Ireland, and it should not be up to that country’s authority alone to protect 500 million consumers in the EU,” BEUC Director General Monique Goyens said after the judgement.

Along with Google, Twitter and Apple, Facebook has its EU headquarters in Ireland, putting it under the oversight of the Irish data protection regulator under privacy rules known as GDPR, which allow for fines of up to 4% of a company’s global turnover for breaches.

The CJEU got involved after a Belgian court sought guidance on Facebook’s challenge to the territorial competence of the Belgian data watchdog, which was trying to stop it from tracking users through cookies stored in the company’s social plug-ins, regardless of whether they have an account or not.

“The BE DPA (Belgium’s data watchdog) now needs to analyse the judgment in more details to determine whether any of the situations described … apply to the case it has opened against Facebook in 2015,” Hielke Hijmans, Chairman of the Belgian Data Protection Authority’s Litigation Chamber, said.

Several national watchdogs in the 27-member EU have long complained about their Irish counterpart, saying that it takes too long to decide on cases. Ireland has dismissed this, saying it has to be extra meticulous in dealing with powerful and well-funded tech giants.

Ireland’s cases in the pipeline include Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp as well as Twitter, Apple, Verizon Media, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn and U.S. digital advertiser Quantcast.

“Under certain conditions, a national supervisory authority may exercise its power to bring any alleged infringement of the GDPR before a court of a member state, even though that authority is not the lead supervisory authority,” the CJEU said.