TechScape: Warnings of a ‘splinternet’ were greatly exaggerated – until now
theguardian.comD oes the growing online muscle of the European Union mean the long-awaited arrival of real privacy online, or the creation of a “splinternet” as international borders begin to make their presence known online as well as off?
It’s an increasingly crucial question. On Monday, Facebook was handed a record fine for a GDPR breach. The social network’s parent company, Meta, was hit with a bill for more than a billion pounds over its ongoing data transfers from the EU to the US. From our story:
The [Irish Data Protection Commission] punishment relates to a legal challenge brought by an Austrian privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, over concerns resulting from the Edward Snowden revelations that European users’ data is not sufficiently protected from US intelligence agencies when it is transferred across the Atlantic.
Meta has also been given six months to stop “the unlawful processing, including storage, in the US” of personal EU data already transferred across the Atlantic, meaning that user data will need to be removed from Facebook servers.
This finding is an astonishingly long time coming: the fight between Facebook and EU regulators has been running for more than a decade so far. It starts even further back, in 2000, when the EU and the US agreed the “safe harbour privacy principles”, which basically stated that each regulator accepted that the other region’s privacy practices were acceptable. In 2011, Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer, began attacking that agreement in court, arguing that Facebook didn’t comply with European regulations. But Schrems’ case was given a boost in 2013, when the Snowden revelations and the US government response revealed a fundamental problem: the American state didn’t respect the privacy rights of
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