Facebook successfully blocked EU antitrust data requirements: hurt user privacy

News on the afternoon of July 28, Beijing time, Facebook today won a court order requiring the EU to temporarily stop requesting more data from Facebook. Facebook believes that this data includes highly sensitive personal information that is not required for antitrust investigations.

The General Court, the EU Intermediate Court in Luxembourg, ruled today that the EU needs to temporarily stop requesting more data from Facebook before a full hearing. Analysts said that this ruling by the General Court may frustrate the European Commission’s efforts to investigate Facebook.

Since last year, Facebook has been facing review by the European Commission. One of the investigations focused on its massive data, and the other focused on its online market platform launched in 2016. 800 million users in 70 countries use this Buy and sell goods on the platform.

So far, Facebook has provided 315,000 documents to the European Commission, totaling approximately 1.7 million pages. However, on July 15, Facebook filed a lawsuit against the European Commission, claiming that the data required by the latter in investigating Facebook was too broad and exceeded the necessary scope, which may harm user privacy.

Facebook’s Deputy General Counsel Tim Lamb said: “The information requested by the European Commission is extremely extensive, which means that we will be required to surrender documents unrelated to the investigation, including highly sensitive personal information, such as Employee’s medical information, personal financial documents, and employee’s family members’ private information, etc.”