Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Social media, enjoying what they claim ‘freedom of expression’ to expand their business globally, have increasingly come under political crossfire in many countries. The latest to join the long chain is the Irish regulator which on Thursday slapped WhatsApp with a penalty of $266 million (euros 225 million) for failing to be transparent about how it handled personal information.
The European Union (EU) had to amend the data protection law recently. The Facebook-owned messenger service, WhatsApp, is the first victim of the strengthened law, media reported on Thursday.
The Irish Data Protection Commission, the chief privacy watchdog in Europe, said it has found violations in the way WhatsApp explained how it processed users’ and non-users data, as well as how data was shared between the messenger and other FB companies.
Recently, Amazon.com Inc. was also slapped with a record euro 746 million fine in Luxembourg for processing personal data, which violated the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Amazon has its European base in Luxembourg.
The GDPR empowers authorities to fine companies as much as 4 percent of their annual sales and appoints watchdogs based in a company’s chosen EU hub in charge of supervising them.
But the Irish regulator, which has at least 28 privacy probes open targeting technology giants like Apple and Google, has faced criticism for delaying cases.
“We disagree with the decision today regarding the transparency we provided to people in 2018 and the penalties are entirely disproportionate,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said. “We will appeal this decision.”
The Irish regulator would also order WhatsApp to take remedial action to bring its data processing communication into compliance. This includes making it clearer how users can lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.
In November 2020, WhatsApp had announced in an Irish regulatory filing that it had set aside euros 77.5 million to pay potential fines from at least two probes by Ireland’s watchdog.
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), a panel of EU data authorities, said in a statement that it pushed for higher privacy fine for WhatsApp leading to the penalty imposed by Ireland.
The fresh penalty will put pressure on WhatsApp over policy changes it announced in January. It was forced to delay the overhaul until May after a backlash from users and regulators over what data the messaging service collects and how it shares that information with its parent FB.
The EDPB had said in July that Facebook’s practices linked to WhatsApp data should be examined “as a matter of priority” by the Irish privacy watchdog which, in turn, said it would consider any regulatory follow-up where needed, but that its most advanced WhatsApp probe had already included “an in-depth inquiry into WhatsApp’s privacy policy.”