Facebook may pull out of Europe due to data-sharing disputes


Only the US should know about our users’ data!

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, threatens to pull out of Europe due to data-sharing disputes. The European Union has a new law that states any company acquiring data should be processed in European servers only. Currently, Facebook processes the data they’ve gathered in both US and European servers, including those in the European Union.

This new law prevents Meta, a US-based company, to provide customised ads for its European users as it has strategically-placed servers both in the European Union and in the US. If data originated in Europe only, then both Facebook and Instagram would not be able to access the data from the continent anywhere in the US. Meta also believes this new law harms other social media companies that rely on ads and services. Facebook is not really the type of company you would trust in data handling, but this is a big issue on their part as they have several users located in Europe.

In addition to that protest, Meta believes that this new law the EU is proposing is detrimental to any social media company that relies on ad targeting and services. Meta already saw a decline in their stocks and lost about $230 Billion, or about 25% of their market share

Source: Time, ExtremeTech, GSMArena