Meta (Photo: ShutterStock)
A $1.3 billion fine has been imposed by the European Union on tech giant Meta for violating user privacy in Europe. The fine relates to the fact that US security authorities snoop on personal information about EU residents, in a way that makes it impossible to guarantee the level of protection of data protection regulations in Europe.
According to Dr. Tehila Schwartz Altshuler, head of the Information Age Democracy Program at the Israel Democracy Institute, a copy fine has critical effects on Meta itself, its value and its business model, because Meta's business model is based on analyzing user data and matching it to advertisers. Leaving this information in Europe would incur enormous costs on the part of the company.
This
is not the first time Meta has been fined for privacy violations, but "the huge fine has reached a magnitude that could affect Meta's stock value and business model. The fine is going to be a retroactive event ten years back for all the tech giants. While it doesn't come as a surprise, the implications for US-EU relations are fatal," she said.
How does this affect us in Israel?
"The information and high-tech industries in general, and the work of marketers in particular, are based, among other things, on information that passes from Europe to companies located in Israel," Altshuler says, which of course crosses sectors. "From a tourism website that invites European tourists to come here and operates cookies that collect information about them, through autonomous vehicle companies that collect information about drivers in Europe and transfer them to Israel for training machine learning, to information created in Europe and on which comparative studies are conducted in the life sciences in Israel."
"Today, these data transfers are protected under a 'compliance certificate' granted to Israel by the European Union in 2011 confirming that data protection in Israel is sufficient to meet European standards. However, this compatibility is currently being retested. The Europeans are no longer playing games, and a country whose privacy laws are out of date cannot trade information with Europe," she said.
Israel is trying to close the gap, but it's not enough
"The biggest problem with compliance is that security and law enforcement agencies in the country to which information is transferred from Europe can snoop on this information. This is actually why the European Union banned the transfer of information to the United States and fined Facebook for it. In Israel, the situation is even more extreme than in the United States," Altshuler says, referring me to the Israeli Privacy Protection Law, which grants security authorities a sweeping exemption from liability for infringement of privacy (section 19(b) of the law). A similar exemption exists in the ISA Law (section 8(a)(1) of the Israel Security Agency Law, 2002-2020). These exemptions certainly do not meet EU requirements.
Therefore, ostensibly, already according to the ruling handed down in 2, because of which the huge fine was handed down today, Israel does not meet the requirements of the EU and will lose the compliance status of its data protection laws with the EU, which will expose commercial companies that transfer information from Europe to Israel to huge fines like the ones we are seeing now.
In the "Mediation Regulations" passed by the Knesset a few weeks ago, which were presented by the Ministry of Justice as a necessity in order not to lose Israeli compatibility with Europe, they tried to deal with this problem by means of Regulation (2(b)(<>), which creates a certain commitment to security organizations and the police, and states that security authorities can violate privacy and data protection for the purpose of protecting state security or law enforcement. Only to the extent necessary and proportionate to ensure these goals.
This attempt, as it turns out, will not be enough to meet EU requirements, because the regulations lack adequate compensation and external oversight of security authorities when they violate data protection rights.
Therefore, the chances are that Israel will be directly harmed by the decision and the fine, both in the context of the decline in the chances of compliance with European law, in frightening fines that may be imposed on companies that transfer information to Israel, and because of the limitation on the transfer of information from Israel to the United States that may arise because of the European demand."
Finally
The European Union's decision to impose this huge fine on Facebook is the beginning of a rolling international event. It bothers Facebook and other giant digital companies, it bothers the US administration, and not for nothing during Biden's last visit to Europe, the story was part of his agenda, but it should occupy the State of Israel no less. It's a shame that our politicians are busy dividing the budgetary pie and weakening the court, but they don't ask themselves who will fund all this good if the high-tech industry suffers if it loses compliance with European law because of the lack of updated privacy legislation and because of the weakening of the court's power as a body that oversees security authorities when they sniff out private information.
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