By Pascal Oparada
Social Media/Reporter
Leading data protection regulator in Europe has asked Facebook to provide “urgent briefing” on its plans to integrate its three social media platforms.
In the statement posted on its website last week, the Irish Data Protection Commission said, “Previous proposals to share data between Facebook companies have given rise to significant data protection concerns and the Irish DPC will be seeking early assurances that all such concerns will be fully taken into account by Facebook in further developing this proposal.”
Last week New York Times said that Facebook is working on unifying the back-end infrastructure of its three separate products, couching it as Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg wanting to assert more control.
The founders of the platforms left Facebook acrimoniously over failure of the company to keep its words on independence of the platforms.
Intagram founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, left Facebook last year over what they called reduced independence.
WhatsApp founders left Facebook earlier, with Brian Acton leaving 2017 and Jan Koum staying until late 2018.
The duo reportedly clashed with Facebook executives over privacy and differences over monetizing end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp.
When asked by New York Times why Facebook is trying to integrate the platforms, a spokesperson said, “We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private.”
“We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks.”
“As you would expect, there is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work,” the spokesperson added.
The Irish Data Protection Commission said it would be scrutinising Facebook’s plans to develop, especially as it affects “the sharing and merging of personal data between different Facebook companies.”
Facebook has come under heavy scrutiny and been slammed with millions of dollars of fines for violating several privacy rules in Europe in the last year, especially after Cambridge Analytica story came to the fore.
