The €1.2bn fine on Meta this week is the biggest ever imposed under EU data protection rules. The Facebook owner hardly has a blameless record, and has been fined before over lax privacy protections, including $5bn by US regulators in 2019 over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Yet in this case Meta — like scores of other companies — is caught in a mismatch between EU and US law. The decision against it signals in effect that there is no functioning legal basis for Meta to do what it has been doing: transferring EU user data to the US. Unless a new attempt to create a framework to bridge the legal gap succeeds, the implications for tech firms, consumers and the internet are far-reaching.
Meta本周被罚款12亿欧元，这是欧盟依照数据保护规定开出的最大一笔罚单。这家Facebook的母公司过往的记录远非纯洁无瑕，之前也曾因保护用户隐私不力被处以过罚款，包括2019年因涉及剑桥分析公司(Cambridge Analytica)丑闻而被美国监管机构罚款50亿美元。然而，在这次的案件中，是欧盟与美国的法律不一致让Meta——以及其他许多公司——遭了殃。对它的处罚实际上表明，Meta一直在做的事情，即把欧盟用户数据传输到美国，是缺乏有效法律作支撑的。除非可以成功建立一个框架来填补法律空白，否则科技公司、消费者和互联网将承受重大后果。