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January 19, 2021, 8:31 am
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Whatsapp’s new terms and conditions are not supposed to become mandatory until May, as the company announced last week, but Whatsapp and Facebook are facing new problems from the Irish data protection authority across the EU.
Shouldn’t Whatsapp just exchange data with Facebook? A dispute about the transparency of data exchange between Facebook and Whatsapp that has been simmering for a long time could slowly be resolved. The Data Protection Commission of Ireland (DPC) has now announced that it had already sent a draft to the data protection authorities of the other EU countries at the end of last year.
According to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) it should be decided at EU level to what extent the planned exchange of data is legally compliant. The Whatsapp template is only the second such draft from the Irish supervisory authority regarding the GDPR. Even if the content of the template seems to fit very well with the new Whatsapp terms and conditions, the whole thing goes back much further – to 2018. Specifically, it is about compliance with Articles 12 to 14 of the GDPR. These determine, among other things, how data must be made available to the data subjects so that they can claim their rights. The aim is to make a final decision on how transparently Whatsapp (and Facebook as a group) must handle the respective data.
EU decision against Whatsapp could take time
However, it will take a few more months before a specific decision is made. In a comparable but less complex case against Twitter, it took seven months from submission to decision. In the current case, there are supposed to be significant differences of opinion between the data protection authorities of the EU states about the interpretation and enforcement of the GDPR.
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Even if Whatsapp announced last week that the company would not implement the new terms and conditions until May – that is, with a delay of three months – that could be tight. It remains to be seen how aggressively the two parties approach each other or whether a corresponding decision against WhatsApp will be reached at all. It is also unclear whether and, if so, how the two things are related.
