Austrian activist Max Schrems displays the Facebook logo. JOE KLAMAR/AFP/Getty Images
Facebook continues to face uphill battles in Europe over its privacy practices — this time, most aggressively in Belgium. The country’s privacy watchdog announced that it will take Facebook to court on June 18 for improperly collecting user information, and for violating privacy in laws in both Belgium and the rest of Europe.
This is an exasperated next step for the Belgian Privacy Commission which has spent the better part of the year performing its own investigations into Facebook’s privacy practices and finding them lacking in multiple reports. Facebook has consistently denied that it violates any such laws, and additionally should not have to answer to the Belgian watchdogs because it operates out of Dublin, Ireland where it abides by European privacy legislation as enforced by Irish data protection authorities. After months of finding Facebook in violation of European privacy laws — according to the Belgian Privacy Commission’s research — the group is now taking the social network company to task in the Court of the First Instance in Brussels.
This court date is preceded by multiple attempts on the part of the Commission to out Facebook’s alleged violation of European privacy rules; last month, it published a report in which it “observed that Facebook ‘processes’ the personal data of its members, users as well as of all internet users who come into contact with Facebook” in ways to target advertising and without alerting its users. The Commission accuses Facebook of processing personal data of its members and nonmembers without adequately explaining how their data will be used, and largely fails to ask for consent. The report from May details how this sentiment from the Commission echoes in other European countries:
Since January 2015 the privacy commissions of the Netherlands (the lead authority), Hamburg-Germany and Belgium have worked together as an own-initiative group. France and Spain recently joined the contact group. There are regular consultations with other European sister organisations. An investigation was started in these different countries and their own national procedure is being followed.
And in February, the University of Leuven’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Law & Information and Communication Technology and the Free University of Brussels’ Department of Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication — both part of the Belgian government’s iMinds digital research center — released a report based on several weeks’ worth of investigations finding Facebook’s updated privacy policy to be lacking in its improvements. That report was requested by the Commission, and it stated that Facebook operates in violation of European law.
It remains to be seen how the Belgian court’s decision will affect Facebook’s operations in Belgium and across the European board. Regardless of the outcome, this debacle is indicative of the mess that is the disparate legal landscape in Europe when it comes to data protection and privacy law. Facebook and other internet giants have faced fire from various governments in Europe as well as the European Commission over the last several years regarding their data collection practices — something Google is all too familiar with — and there is seemingly no end in sight as both countries and tech companies continue to butt heads.
