Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company, blasted a landmark German antitrust judgment to limit data collection as ‘obviously faulty’ and undermining EU data protection standards on Tuesday.
Meta’s criticism of Germany’s antitrust authority comes after the latter said in 2019 that the world’s largest social network had misused its market position by collecting users’ data without their consent and ordered it to halt.
According to the competition enforcer, the data harvesting included users’ surfing behavior when they visited a website with a Facebook ‘like’ button — even if the internet surfer did not click on the button.
The lawsuit highlights the growing regulatory scrutiny of US internet behemoths and efforts to limit their power around the world.
However, in the German instance, the question is whether the watchdog overstepped its authority by utilizing its antitrust powers to solve data protection problems.
Meta contested the ruling in a German court, which then sought guidance from the European Union’s Court of Justice (CJEU).
The German antitrust decision was “clearly flawed,” with “far-reaching restrictions on Facebook’s data processing,” according to Meta lawyer Hans-Georg Kamann.
He chastised the German regulator for failing to cooperate with the Irish data protection regulator, which oversees Facebook because its European headquarters are in Ireland.
“The Bundeskartellamt has openly undermined the substantive and procedural requirements of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) law,” Kamann stated .
The German watchdog’s lawyer, Joerg Nothdurft, disputed the criticism, stating that contact had been made with data protection regulators.
The German government defended the antitrust judgment, claiming that it was critical for the competition authority to conduct a data protection assessment as part of its inquiry since online marketplaces leverage users’ data to build market dominance.
According to its lawyer, Philipp Krueger, the German decree serves the goal of maintaining free competition and is not about data protection.
The CJEU court adviser will issue a non-binding opinion on September 20, with justices anticipated to rule in the ensuing months.
C-252/21 Meta Platforms and others are involved in this case.
Following a period of intense scrutiny and damaging whistleblower leaks, word of Facebook’s plan to rebrand and alter its name began to emerge on October 21, 2021. Mark Zuckerberg addressed the company’s continuous criticism of its social services and operations, as well as the company’s shifting efforts to construct the metaverse – without mentioning the rebranding and name change. On October 28, 2021, the metaverse vision and name change from Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms were unveiled at Facebook Connect.
According to Facebook’s public relations campaign, the name change represents the company’s long-term goal of creating the metaverse, a digital extension of the physical world through social media, virtual reality, and augmented reality capabilities.
