Despite the entry into force of new stricter rules for personal data protection, the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica affair is still in everybody's mind and the European Parliament has not received a sufficient explanation.
The President of the ALDE group, Guy Verhofstadt, from Belgium, explained during a press conference on Tuesday 29 May that, “We had good questions but not the right format, while the Congress had the right format but the wrong questions”. These ideas resonate with the widespread criticism expressed after Mark Zuckerberg's hearing at the Parliament last week (see EUROPE 12024).
Far from being reassured by the answers provided in writing by the head of the US social network (see EUROPE 12026), the Presidents of the political groups intend to send another letter on Thursday to Mark Zuckerberg, containing a range of additional questions in view of the next hearing at the civil liberties committee, which is expected to be attended by legal experts from Facebook. Parliament is therefore not intending to stop things here.
Since the entry into force on Friday 25 May of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Facebook has not been the only one to find itself in the middle of a storm.
On Monday, the French advocacy group, Quadrature du Net, announced that it had submitted five collective complaints against Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn to the French National Commission for Informatics and Freedoms (CNIL).
The complaints accuse the GAFAM of failing to respect the GDPR rules on consent. They are particularly targeting the practices used to obtain consent through pre-ticked boxes or clauses stipulating that silence equals acceptance. The CNIL explains that, “This treatment is based on consent that is invalid because it is inexplicit and is not free”.
Over a period of six weeks, the CNIL obtained more than 12,000 names involved in these collective complaints. It has now announced that its next targets will include Whatsapp, Instagram, Android, Outlook and Skype.
These complaints have just been added to those submitted by the Austrian activist, Max Schrems and his organisation NOYB (None of your business) almost everywhere in Europe against Android, Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook (see EUROPE 12027), the same day the GDPR entered into force. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana and Mathieu Bion)