Where data privacy law enforcement would normally fall under the domain of Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, linking data collection to Facebook’s dominant market position means the probe will be conducted instead by the Federal Cartel Office, which handles antitrust cases.
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The office will look into whether the configuration of user contracts allowing the company to use user data is a possible abuse of its position as the market leader in its field, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on Wednesday.
The Bundeskartellamt president Andreas Mundt said: “For advertising-financed internet services such as Facebook, user data are hugely important”.
The Bundeskartellamt has initiated a proceeding against Facebook Inc., USA, the Irish subsidiary of the company and Facebook Germany GmbH, the cartel office said in a statement. By creating user profiles the company enables its advertising customers to better target their advertising activities.
Data regulators from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Hamburg, Germany, have opened separate national investigations into the social media giant, Bloomberg reported.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, visited Berlin on a charm offensive last week.
European Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso said the EU executive shared the view of the German cartel office that the mere infringement of data protection rules by a dominant company did not automatically amount to a competition violation.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network. A spokesman for the Belgian competition authority declined to comment on whether it was cooperating with the German probe, while the British regulator was not immediately reachable. The social network uses the data to sell customized advertisements on their site, and Germany is a key market, with 22 million users, according to Statista.
Most of the Facebook users fail to understand the terms and conditions that the social network lays down.
A European Commission spokesperson said: “It cannot be excluded that a behaviour that violates data protection rules could also be relevant when investigating a possible violation of EU competition rules”.
The free messaging service, which recently surpassed 1 billion regular users itself, encrypts all messages inside its apps, so that the communications traveling over the company’s network can’t be intercepted and read while in transit.
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The German regulator added that it was working closely with other competition authorities in the European Union, consumer protection groups, and Brussels’ antitrust officials as part of its probe.
