Meta Stock Falls Premarket: EU Slaps Company With Record $1.3B Penalty For Data Privacy Violation

The Irish Data Protection Commission slapped Meta Platforms, Inc META with a penalty of a record €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) for user privacy invasion.
Meta has a deadline of five months to “suspend any future transfer of personal data to the U.S.” and six months to stop “the unlawful processing, including storage, in the U.S.” of transferred personal EU data, Bloomberg reports.
Meta held $37.44 billion in cash and equivalents as of March 31, 2023.
In 2020, the EU’s top court annulled an EU-U.S. pact regulating transatlantic data flows over data safety concerns.
EU regulators in December launched proposals to replace the previous “Privacy Shield” pact that the EU’s Court of Justice had struck down.
The EU regulators negotiated for months with the U.S., which yielded an executive order by President Joe Biden and U.S. pledges to ensure that EU citizens’ data is safe once it’s shipped across the Atlantic.
Since May 2018, regulators in the 27-nation EU have had the power to wield fines of as much as 4% of a company’s annual revenue for the most severe violations. The EU had penalized Amazon.Com Inc AMZN by a record €746 million ($821.20 million).
Price Action: META shares traded lower by 1.36% at $242.30 premarket on the last check Monday.
Photo by Anthony Quintano via Wikimedia Commons