Will Facebook and Instagram leave Europe? Europeans react
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has allegedly threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from Europe. The reason for this threat is EU's user data privacy laws that don't allow Meta to transfer user data back to the US.
In a report released on February 3, the company said, "If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on SCCs (standard contractual clauses) or rely upon other alternative means of data transfers from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe."
European lawmaker Axel Voss tweeted, "META cannot just blackmail the EU into giving up its data protection standards, leaving the EU would be their loss."
A Meta spokesperson clarified the statement on the report to CNBC on February 7 that the company was not threatening and did not have plans to pull Facebook and Instagram from Europe.
In July 2020, the European Court of Justice ruled that companies that were moving user data outside the European Union, would have to provide the same protections to the data that is given inside the European bloc to whichever jurisdiction it was moving to. This ruling came after privacy activist Max Schrems lauched a lawsuit with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner in 2013 against companies transferring personal user data to other countries.
Max argued in court that based on what whistleblower Edward Snowden had revealed, US law did not sufficiently protect citizens against surveillance by public authorities. At the time, Max also raised the complaint against Facebook for the same reason. This forced Facebook to move to Standard Contractual Clauses or SCCs.
But given Facebook's history of using user data for ads and its lawless sharing of fake news, Europeans are quite happy about the so-called threat, to the point that some have been praying for it to come true.
Here is what all of Europe truly feels over this 'threat':
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It is possible to imagine that a company like Meta is surely going to run into more future problems in Europe, especially if it decides to continue staying in a continent that truly values its citizen's privacy and autonomy.