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EU-US-HACKING-FACEBOOK-COMPUTERS
EU warns Facebook not to lose control of data security
LUXEMBOURG, Oct 2, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – The EU’s top data privacy enforcer
expressed worry Tuesday that Facebook had lost control of data security after
a vast privacy breach that she said affected five million Europeans.
“It is a question for the management, if they have things under control,”
EU Justice and Consumer Affairs Commissioner Vera Jourova told AFP in
Luxembourg.
“The magnitude of the company … makes it very difficult to manage, but
they have to do that because they are harvesting the data and they are making
incredible money on using our privacy as the commodity,” she added.
Jourova spoke just days after Facebook admitted that up to 50 million user
accounts around the world had been breached by hackers, in yet another
scandal for the beleaguered social platform.
“I will know more … in hours or days but according to our knowledge,
five million Europeans have been affected out of those 50, which is an
incredible number,” she said.
Jourova said Facebook’s quick revelation of the case demonstrated that new
European rules on data protection implemented earlier this year are working.
New EU rules — the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — have been
billed as the biggest shake-up of privacy regulations since the birth of the
web and give European regulators vast new enforcement powers.
The case for GDPR was boosted by another recent scandal over the
harvesting of Facebook users’ data by Cambridge Analytica, a US-British
political research firm, for the 2016 US presidential election.
Jourova said the worst cases involve a company finding a major breach then
failing to warn authorities or their users, which she said doesn’t appear to
be the case in the latest Facebook drama. Under GDPR, companies can be fined
up to four percent of annual global turnover if they fail to abide by the
rules, including notification of the data breach within 72 hours.
Facebook met this requirement, Jourova pointed out, which “is one of the
factors which might result in lower sanctions, but this is only theoretical”.
BSS/AFP/ARS/1758 hrs