And let that be a warning: at last, Brussels shows some global leadership worth following
Could the record €1.2 billion fine the EU has imposed on Meta for breaching its privacy laws by continuing to export users’ data to the United States following the annulment of the Safe Harbor agreements in 2015 just mark the beginning of the end of surveillance capitalism, cementing Brussels’ global leadership as a regulator?
The Safe Harbor agreements the EU and the United States signed in 2000 were based on the agreement that both territories were subject to similar privacy protection practices, and that therefore, transfers of citizens’ data could take place between the two because they enjoyed similar protections. But when Austrian lawyer and activist Max Schrems questioned this in 2011 and took legal action, arguing that Facebook was ignoring the agreement’s provisions, he was backed up by Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 and subsequent years, which gave wings to his lawsuit and ended with the annulment of these agreements in 2015. Schrems was right: the United States, and Facebook in particular, was not respecting the privacy of EU citizens.
That case ends with this week’s decision: that by transferring European citizens’ data to its servers in the United States, Facebook exposed them to a series of unacceptable risks and infringed their fundamental rights…
