A European Data Privacy Office Has 15 Open Investigations. Ten Are About Facebook. (nbcnews.com) 20
An office that's responsible for enforcing European data privacy laws against many of the biggest U.S. tech firms is spending much of its time on one company: Facebook. From a report: The Ireland Data Protection Commission said in a report that as of Dec. 31 it had 15 ongoing investigations of multinational tech companies. Ten of the investigations were about Facebook or its subsidiaries, Instagram and WhatsApp. One of the investigations into Facebook is especially wide-ranging, examining whether the social network has met its obligations "to secure and safeguard the personal data of its users." Twitter faces a similar probe, the report says. The report, released early on Thursday on Dublin time, underscores how much Facebook's handling of sensitive personal data is dominating legal and policy debates about privacy -- and how much potential regulatory danger the social network faces in Europe, where privacy laws are more strict than in the U.S.
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The report is online... 2 Twitter, 2 Apple, 1 LinkedIn....
A data privacy office has 15 open investigations (Score:1)
Wow. It must be a really huge office to have fifteen open investigations!
Re:A data privacy office has 15 open investigation (Score:5, Interesting)
The significance being that each one could potentially result in a fine of 4% of global turnover. I make that $2.2 billion per investigation.
Unfortunately some of it probably pre-dates GDPR so the fines might not reach that level.
Also it's good that they are being investigated for shirking their responsibilities.
Facebook is trying to collect MORE personal data (Score:1)
They recently locked my account and won't let me back in until I give them a mobile phone number. I do not have a mobile phone, and I am certainly not going to go buy one for Facebook.
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Any service that asks for your mobile phone number is a no-starter for me too.
Why are people assuming everyone has a mobile phone number in 2019 is beyond comprehension. I know a lot of people who have a landline (no SMS), only have data (no SMS), some of them don't have either and only use any open wi-fi network they can find (no SMS either, only iMessage/etc).
Tip of the iceberg (Score:2)
Can't wait for the world to catch up and a market for "European smart TV" to become the next hot thing among affluent folks concerned with privacy.
14 replies (Score:2)
A whole government department (Score:2)
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No, a fucking idiot wrote the summary. The department exists to enforce data protection laws irrespective of in which country a company breaching them is based.