By Foo Yun Chee and Padraic Halpin
BRUSSELS/DUBLIN, Feb 10 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms unit WhatsApp’s fight against the EU privacy watchdog was sent back to a lower tribunal on Tuesday, prolonging a five-year tussle triggered by the latter’s order to the Irish data protection authority to increase a fine to 225 million euros ($268 million).
The case is one of many for Ireland’s DPC, which is the lead privacy regulator for most of the U.S. tech giants due to the location of their EU head offices in the country.
Ireland’s regulator took action following complaints about WhatsApp’s use of personal data in the country, later upping its fine in 2021 after the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) intervened.
Meta subsequently appealed the penalty at a lower tribunal but lost after judges said it had no legal standing to sue the authority as it was not directly affected by the EDPB’s decision.
The Court of Justice of the European Union on Tuesday disagreed with the tribunal’s ruling and told it to examine the case on its merits.
“The action brought by WhatsApp Ireland against Binding Decision 1/2021 of the European Data Protection Board is admissible,” the Luxembourg-based court said.
“We welcome the Court’s final judgment on the matter which upholds our argument that those businesses and people should be able to challenge decisions the EDPB makes against them, so that it can be held fully accountable by the EU courts,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said.
The DPC has imposed fines of more than 4 billion euros on large tech companies for GDPR breaches since 2020 but has only collected 17.5 million euros due to all but two of its completed investigations being subjected to lengthy legal challenges.
With many of the fines increased by similar EDPB interventions, a number of the appeals can only progress once there is clarity from the European courts on how WhatsApp’s 2021 penalty was calculated.
The case is C-97/23P WhatsApp Ireland v EDPB.
($1 = 0.8403 euros)
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, additional reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta; editing by Philip Blenkinsop, Kirsten Donovan)
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