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Facebook's leading data protection regulator in Europe has asked the company for an "urgent briefing" on plans to integrate the underlying infrastructure of its three social messaging platforms.
In a statement posted on its website late last week, the Irish Data Protection Commission wrote: "Previous Facebook business-to-business data sharing proposals have raised many concerns about data protection. , and the Irish DPC will request from the start the badurance that all these taken into account by Facebook in the development of this proposal. "
Last week, the New York Times announced that Facebook intends to unify the backbone infrastructure of its three separate products by calling it Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, claiming control of acquisitions including the founders have since left the building.
Instagram The founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, left Facebook last year due to rising tensions related to the reduction of independence, according to our sources.
While WhatsApp The founders have already left Facebook, Brian Acton having left late 2017 and Jan Koum, until the spring of 2018. They would have run up against Facebook executives about user privacy and differences over how to monetize the company. encrypted platform from end to end.
Later, Acton said that Facebook had urged it to say to European regulators who valued it approving the 2014 merger that it would be "really difficult" for the company to combine user data from WhatsApp and Facebook.
In the event, Facebook then linked accounts on both platforms just two years after the finalization of the acquisition. The European Commission then fined him $ 122 million for providing "incorrect or misleading" information at the time of the merger. Although Facebook claimed to have made unintentional "mistakes" in the 2014 filing.
A few years later, Facebook is now looking for a complete unification of the platform of separate messaging products.
"We want to create the best messaging experiences possible. and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private, "a spokesman told us when we asked for a response to the NYT report. "We are striving to make our end-to-end email products more encrypted and we are looking for ways to more easily access friends and family via networks."
"As you can imagine, there is a lot of discussion and debate as we embark on the long process of determining all the details of how it will work," added the spokesman, confirming the contents of the report. from the NYT.
There would certainly be a lot of details to settle. Notably the feasibility of legally merging user data into separate products in Europe, where a controversial debate on the protection of privacy in 2016 by WhatsApp was announced: he suddenly announced that he would share users' data with the parent company Facebook (although this has never been the case before), including the sharing of data for marketing purposes – a quick regulatory intervention has been triggered.
Facebook was forced to suspend the flow of data related to marketing in Europe. Although he continued to share data between WhatsApp and Facebook for security and business intelligence purposes, the French data controller issued a notice at the end of 2017, warning that the latter transfers also lacked a legal basis. .
A court in Hamburg, Germany, has also officially banned Facebook from using WhatsApp user data for its own purposes.
At the beginning of last year, as a result of a data sharing survey, the UK data watchdog obtained a commitment from WhatsApp not to share its data with Facebook as long as both services could not do it in a manner that meets the strict standards of the region. respect for privacy, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Facebook has only avoided a fine on the part of the UK regulator because it froze the data feeds after regulatory intervention. But the company remains clearly under surveillance – and any new initiative to further integrate the platforms would trigger immediate scrutiny, as evidenced by the shot of the DPC center in Ireland (Facebook's international headquarters is based in the country).
The 2016 WhatsApp-Facebook privacy round was also held before the entry into force of the European GDPR. And the updated privacy protection framework includes a regime of considerably higher maximum fines for any violation.
Under the regulation, the supervisory bodies also have the power to prohibit companies from processing data. Which, in the case of a giant of income-rich data mining like Facebook, could be a much more powerful deterrent than even a $ 1 billion fine.
We have contacted Facebook to comment on the Irish DPC statement and will update this report with any response.
Here is the complete statement of the Irish watchdog:
While we understand that Facebook's proposal to integrate the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram platforms is at a very early stage of conceptual development, the Irish DPC has asked Facebook Ireland to provide an urgent briefing on what is offers. The Irish DPC will look closely at Facebook projects as they develop, especially as they involve the sharing and merging of personal data between different Facebook companies. Previous data sharing proposals between Facebook companies have raised many data protection concerns and the Irish DPC will promptly request badurances that all these concerns will be fully addressed by Facebook in the development of this data. proposal. It must be emphasized that the proposed integration can only take place in the EU if it is able to meet all the requirements of the RGPD.
Facebook may be hoping that extending end-to-end encryption to Instagram as part of its planned integration effort, according to the NYT report, could offer a technical way to prevent the fall of any hammer regulators of confidentiality.
Although the use of e2e encryption still does not protect the metadata of the crop. And metadata is a rich source of inferences about individuals who, by virtue of EU law, would certainly constitute personal data. Thus, even with robust encryption on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp sites, unified messaging platforms could still collect a lot of personal data to their parent data mining company.
Facebook applications are also not open source. Thus, even WhatsApp, which uses the respected Signal Protocol communication protocol for its e2e encryption, remains under its control. External audits are not able to verify exactly what is happening in the application data (for example, what data is returned to Facebook). Users still need to trust Facebook's implementation, but regulators may require evidence of authentic email privacy.
Nevertheless, Facebook's push to integrate separate messaging products into a single, unified platform could be a defensive strategy – intended to cast a shadow over antitrust regulators as political control over its position and its power in the market continues to grow. Although it would certainly be an aggressive defense to tighten more closely separate platforms.
But if the competition authorities force Facebook to reduce its risk of selling one or two of its messaging platforms, it may not have anything to lose by making it technically more difficult to split its business.
At the time of the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, Facebook had promised autonomy to their founders. Zuckerberg has since changed its mind, according to the NYT – believing that the integration of these three technologies would increase the utility of each of them and thus deter users from dropping out each service.
It can also protect against the loss of popularity of one of the three messaging platforms by providing the company with internal levers it can launch to try to artificially transform the activity on an application less popular by encouraging cross-platform use.
And given the staggering size of the Facebook messaging empire, which globally spans more than 2.5 years, users' resistance to centralized manipulation via pushing their buttons to increase multi engagement -Platforms on Facebook's activities may be futile without regulatory intervention.
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