Connect with us

Business

#Facebook privacy issues may not be competition matters: EU antitrust chief

SHARE:

Published

on

We use your sign-up to provide content in ways you've consented to and to improve our understanding of you. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Facebook's problems with European privacy regulators do not mean that the social network has breached the bloc's competition rules, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said on Friday (9 September), writes Foo Yun Chee.

"The German authority is concerned that Facebook may have forced its users to accept privacy terms that aren't in line with the data protection rules," Vestager said in the text of a speech to be delivered at a conference in Copenhagen."But as our German colleagues rightly point out, even if Facebook has broken those rules, that doesn't automatically mean that it has also broken the competition rules as well," she said.

The German government has been critical of Facebook in the past while political leaders and regulators have also complained that the world's largest social network, with 1.6 billion monthly users, had been slow to tackle hate speech and anti-immigrant messages.

Facebook raised regulatory concerns last month when it loosened the privacy policy of WhatsApp, the world's most popular mobile messaging application, prompting the chair of Europe's leading group of privacy regulators to say that it would closely scrutinize the move.

Share this article:

EU Reporter publishes articles from a variety of outside sources which express a wide range of viewpoints. The positions taken in these articles are not necessarily those of EU Reporter.

Trending