Facebook’s Extremely Underhanded Method To Avoid EU Privacy Laws, Moving 1.5 Billion Users Around

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was meant to be the European Union’s way of ensuring that the data of its citizens will be protected from misuse such as in the case in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It was meant to take effect on May 25th but Facebook is already moving 1.5 billion of its users from Ireland to the US to avoid complying with the new laws.

While Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg previously said that he would follow the spirit of the GDPR, he clearly doesn’t intend to do it literally. This is why come next month, only EU users will fall under the protection of the GDPR. Had the social network left the majority of its users in Ireland, they could have enjoyed that level of protection as well, Reuters reports, but Facebook didn’t want that.

This is an extremely underhanded method of savings its cash cow and proves that the social network cares more about profits than it does for its users. Not complying with the new EU laws would have earned Facebook a four percent deduction of its annual global revenue as a fine for any infractions, which made the 1.5 billion users stored in Ireland a huge liability.

By moving them to its California headquarters, the social media site has made sure that it wouldn’t have to deal with that headache at all. As Phone Arena notes, this also makes it seems like Facebook doesn’t even care about the recent scrutiny that it has been placed under following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and everything that followed afterward.

Facebook isn’t the only social media company doing this either as LinkedIn is also moving its non-EU members back to the US. The privacy protection laws are simply much lower and less restrictive than they are in many other countries. By moving their users to American soil, social networks ensure that they can keep abusing user data to their hearts’ content without consequence, or so they seem to think.