Tech Giants’ Top EU Privacy Watchdog Attacked Over Slow Pace
by Stephanie Bodoni- Privacy activist Max Schrems criticizes Irish data authority
- Open letter urges EU action amid frustration over long probes
Silicon Valley’s main data-protection watchdog in Europe came under attack from one of the region’s leading privacy advocates for taking too long to wrap up probes into Facebook Inc. and its Instagram and WhatsApp units.
Max Schrems’s group Noyb in an open letter on Monday called on European Union authorities to “take action” against the Irish Data Protection Commission, which has yet to issue any significant fines exactly two years after strict EU rules empowered the regulator to levy hefty penalties for serious privacy violations.
The letter comes just days after the Irish authority said it’s edging closer to delivering its first major sanctions under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation after finalizing a draft decision in a probe concerning Twitter Inc. and completing a further procedural step in a separate probe concerning WhatsApp.
“With about 10,000 complaints in two years and no fines at all against private actors, it is obvious that Ireland does not effectively implement EU law,” Schrems’s group said in the letter.
Schrems also accused the regulator of “secret cooperation” with Facebook during 10 meetings before the GDPR took effect -- putting the Irish authority in a situation where it is now “structurally biased because it is essentially reviewing its own legal advice to Facebook on how to bypass” rules on getting user consent.
“There were no ‘secret meetings’ held between the DPC and Facebook,” Graham Doyle, deputy commissioner at the data protection commission, said in an email. “We regularly engage and meet with companies from all sectors as part of our regulatory enforcement and supervision functions” just as other EU data regulators do.
GDPR empowered regulators to levy penalties of as much as 4% of a company’s annual revenue for the most serious violations. The biggest fine to date was a 50 million-euro ($54.5 million) penalty for Google by France’s watchdog CNIL.
(Updates with response from Irish authority in final paragraph)