Facebook Fined €110m Over ‘Misleading’ WhatsApp Data Deal

The European Commission which acts as the EU’s competition watchdog, ruled on Thursday that the company had broken strict data protection rules.

The European Union’s antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager, said that Facebook had told the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, that the social network would not combine the company’s data with that of WhatsApp – which has more than one billion users, but two years later launched a service that did exactly that.

“The Commission has found that, contrary to Facebook’s statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users’ identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility,” the Commission said.

“Today’s decision sends a clear signal to companies that they must comply with all aspects of E.U. merger rules,” Ms. Vestager said. “And it imposes a proportionate and deterrent fine on Facebook. The commission must be able to take decisions about mergers’ effects on competition in full knowledge of accurate facts.”

The commission added that it won’t overturn the approval for the $22 billion WhatsApp purchase as “the incorrect or misleading information provided by Facebook did not have an impact on the outcome of the clearance decision”.

In response, Facebook said it would not appeal the fine as it acted in good faith in its deliberations with Europe’s antitrust officials.

“The errors we made in our 2014 filings were not intentional,” Facebook said in a statement. “The commission has confirmed that they did not impact the outcome of the merger review.”