Recent reports have claimed that Meta wanted to leave the European market a few days ago. The company, however, has now explicitly stated that it has no such plan and will continue its operations in Europe.
On Tuesday, the company shared a blog post saying that it has “absolutely no desire to withdraw from Europe,” after media outlets claimed it had ‘threatened’ to pull Facebook and Instagram from the continent.
This came amid the uncertainty over whether the US and European Union would agree to replace a scrapped transatlantic privacy agreement.
“Meta is not wanting or “threatening” to leave Europe and any reporting that implies we do is simply not true. Much like 70 other EU and US companies, we are identifying a business risk resulting from uncertainty around international data transfers.” The company noted this in its blog post.
The ‘threat’ from Meta, of course, came in the form of a disclosure from the company’s latest earnings report.
Published last week, it stated that if the US and European Union fail to reach a new agreement on data transfer, the company will “likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe.”
This isn’t the first time Meta has issued similar warnings, but, in the past, it did so without naming Facebook and Instagram specifically.
To clarify the issue between Meta and the EU, let’s refer to the Safe Harbour Agreement and Privacy Shield. The agreements regulated data exchange over the USA and EU.
Although, they were swiftly struck down by the European Court of Justice over growing concerns of processing EU citizens’ data in US servers. In recent years, meta has faced many lawsuits in the European market, forcing it to spend billions of dollars on settling them.
“We want to see the fundamental rights of EU users protected, and we want the internet to continue to operate as it was intended: without friction, in compliance with applicable laws — but not confined by national borders,” the company said.
The departure of Facebook and Instagram may worry some European users, but the lawmakers seem to welcome the move. “I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook,” said French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire.
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Alfred Gitonga is a passionate tech news writer with a deep interest in smartphones and related technologies. He is a staff writer at Mobitrends.co.ke.
