{"id":30032,"date":"2017-05-18T09:05:07","date_gmt":"2017-05-18T09:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=30032"},"modified":"2017-05-18T09:05:07","modified_gmt":"2017-05-18T09:05:07","slug":"eu-fines-facebook-110-million-euros-whatsapp-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/business\/eu-fines-facebook-110-million-euros-whatsapp-deal.html","title":{"rendered":"EU fines Facebook 110 million euros over WhatsApp deal"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"font-size:22px;\"><strong><span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">EU fines Facebook 110 million euros over WhatsApp deal<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><br \/>\n<\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-size:18px;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">European Union antitrust regulators fined Facebook (FB.O) 110 million euros ($122 million) on Thursday for giving misleading information during a vetting of its deal to acquire messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-size:18px;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">Calling it a &quot;proportionate and deterrent fine&quot;, the European Commission, which acts as the EU&#39;s competition watchdog, said Facebook had said it could not automatically match user accounts on its namesake platform and WhatsApp but two years later launched a service that did exactly that.<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-size:18px;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">&quot;The Commission has found that, contrary to Facebook&#39;s statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users&#39; identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility,&quot; the Commission said.<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-size:18px;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">Facebook said in a statement the errors made in its 2014 filings were not intentional and that the Commission had confirmed they had not affected the outcome of the merger review.<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-size:18px;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">&quot;Today&#39;s announcement brings this matter to a close,&quot; Facebook said.<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-size:18px;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">The fine would not reverse the Commission&#39;s decision to clear the purchase of WhatsApp and was unrelated to separate investigations into data protection issues, it added.<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-size:18px;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">Reuters reported on Wednesday that Facebook was set to be fined.<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-size:18px;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">The Commission could have fined Facebook up to 1 percent of its turnover &#8211; which would have been $276 million based on 2016 results &#8211; but said that Facebook had cooperated with the proceedings and acknowledged its infringement.<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-size:18px;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">The EU sanction comes after Facebook received a separate 150,000-euro fine on Tuesday by a French data watchdog for failing to prevent its users&#39; data being accessed by advertisers.<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-size:18px;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">Last week the Italian antitrust authorities levied a 3 million-euro fine on WhatsApp for allegedly obliging users to agree to share their personal data with Facebook.<\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n\t<span style=\"font-size:8px;\"><span style=\"color:#000000;\"><span style=\"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;\">Source:-&nbsp;http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-eu-facebook-antitrust-idUSKCN18E0LA<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"fb-background-color\">\n\t\t\t  <div \n\t\t\t  \tclass = \"fb-comments\" \n\t\t\t  \tdata-href = \"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/business\/eu-fines-facebook-110-million-euros-whatsapp-deal.html\"\n\t\t\t  \tdata-numposts = \"10\"\n\t\t\t  \tdata-lazy = \"true\"\n\t\t\t\tdata-colorscheme = \"light\"\n\t\t\t\tdata-order-by = \"social\"\n\t\t\t\tdata-mobile=true>\n\t\t\t  <\/div><\/div>\n\t\t  <style>\n\t\t    .fb-background-color {\n\t\t\t\tbackground: #ffffff !important;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t.fb_iframe_widget_fluid_desktop iframe {\n\t\t\t    width: 630px !important;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t  <\/style>\n\t\t  ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>EU fines Facebook 110 million euros over WhatsApp deal European Union antitrust regulators fined Facebook (FB.O) 110 million euros ($122 million) on Thursday for giving misleading information during a vetting of its deal to acquire messaging service WhatsApp in 2014. Calling it a &quot;proportionate and deterrent fine&quot;, the European Commission, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":30034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[18625],"class_list":["post-30032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-eu-fines-facebook-110-million-euros-over-whatsapp-deal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}