It’s not the news that tech giant Meta wants to hear but the company’s WhatsApp platform has been slapped with a mega €5.5 Million fine for breaching the GDPR.
The incident arose after one user in Germany put forward a complaint to the Data Protection Commission in Ireland. This particular fine to strike Meta arrived just some weeks after the same governing body hit the company with another bigger fine worth 390 million Euros.
It further went on to detail how WhatsApp was struggling to meet the requirements of the GDPR and therefore, it needed to work hard. The timeframe allotted included the likes of six months as this was the associated time frame to fix any errors as failure to do so may cause sanctions.
As per the complainant, the app is making its users enter into an agreement for data processing if they wish to further make use of its services. And that, according to the complainant is a huge breach of the GDPR’s policy. The latter states that every user has the right to select which data should be processed.
To finally arrive at this particular decision, the DPC had to solve some major disagreements with the concerned authorities. The overall consensus was that Meta should be hit savagely and now, the DPC is being called out to take the investigation to the next level.
Meanwhile, a report by the Independent claims that Facebook’s parent firm won’t be accepting any fine without putting forward a fight and it plans on making an appeal against such a decision.
WhatsApp is now currently processing all the operations in the service so as to determine whether or not it could process data that comes under the special category heading. This includes data processing for the likes of behavioral advertising, and marketing, and providing insights in the form of stats to different third parties.
Read next: Whatsapp is working on a new feature to let users share voice notes in their status updates
The incident arose after one user in Germany put forward a complaint to the Data Protection Commission in Ireland. This particular fine to strike Meta arrived just some weeks after the same governing body hit the company with another bigger fine worth 390 million Euros.
It further went on to detail how WhatsApp was struggling to meet the requirements of the GDPR and therefore, it needed to work hard. The timeframe allotted included the likes of six months as this was the associated time frame to fix any errors as failure to do so may cause sanctions.
As per the complainant, the app is making its users enter into an agreement for data processing if they wish to further make use of its services. And that, according to the complainant is a huge breach of the GDPR’s policy. The latter states that every user has the right to select which data should be processed.
To finally arrive at this particular decision, the DPC had to solve some major disagreements with the concerned authorities. The overall consensus was that Meta should be hit savagely and now, the DPC is being called out to take the investigation to the next level.
Meanwhile, a report by the Independent claims that Facebook’s parent firm won’t be accepting any fine without putting forward a fight and it plans on making an appeal against such a decision.
WhatsApp is now currently processing all the operations in the service so as to determine whether or not it could process data that comes under the special category heading. This includes data processing for the likes of behavioral advertising, and marketing, and providing insights in the form of stats to different third parties.
Read next: Whatsapp is working on a new feature to let users share voice notes in their status updates
