- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Neil Hodge2020-11-20T19:17:00
The Irish arm of WhatsApp has set aside $91.8 million for possible administrative fines arising from long-standing investigations by Ireland’s data regulator into the way the messaging platform shares data with Facebook.
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Ireland’s Data Protection Commission announced a record-breaking €225 million (U.S. $267 million) fine against WhatsApp that is equally significant for the compliance lessons it imparts and inconsistency of the GDPR it exposes.
The Irish Data Protection Commission has reached out to Facebook seeking to determine whether the social media giant’s weekend data breach should receive scrutiny under the General Data Protection Regulation.
Ireland’s data regulator has 27 ongoing cross-border inquiries into Big Tech firms, according to its latest annual report. It expects several cases to be resolved in the coming year.
It has been four years since the European Union’s flagship data privacy legislation came into force, but concerns are already being raised about whether the General Data Protection Regulation is being outpaced by technological developments and their use of data.
So far, Europe’s wide-reaching data privacy rules have seemingly failed to curb Big Tech firms’ use and abuse of citizens’ personal data. As a result, some EU data regulators are pursuing their own investigations—often through other legislation.
Belgian Data Protection Authority head David Stevens and Member of European Parliament Axel Voss discussed ways the General Data Protection Regulation could be improved for the future during a keynote at CW’s virtual Europe event.
