More bad news for Meta as Irish DPC imposes €265M fine over GDPR violations

It would be an understatement to say it has been a bad year for Meta (NASDAQ: META). After the stock price tumbled and the firm laid off tens of thousands of workers, more bad news arrived as the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) hit the beleaguered firm with a €265 million ($274 million) fine in connection with its GDPR obligations violation. It also imposed a range of corrective measures.

The investigation began in April 2021 after the DPC became aware of a Facebook personal data leak online. The investigation assessed Facebook search, FB messenger contact importer, and Insta contact importer tool and found that they violated compliance with GDPR’s obligations for data protection and design by default.

The DPC cooperated with other European Union Data Protection Supervisory Authorities, which concurred with its findings.

Meta just keeps sinking lower

For those who don’t know, Meta is a rebrand of the original company Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the rebrand in 2021, touting it as a pivot to focus on the Metaverse. In reality, it was an attempt to distance the firm from Facebook’s increasingly toxic reputation related to data leaks, privacy violations, and failure to intervene to prevent underhanded political engineering and even full-blown massacres organized on its platforms.

While the rebrand may have worked temporarily, Meta can’t change its fundamentally unethical business model as easily. Whatever Zuckerberg and his PR team do to clean up the company’s public image, it still depends on data harvesting and extraction, so leaks and breaches are bound to keep occurring.

In other words, bad things will keep happening when your business model is fundamentally exploitative and unethical. That’s just cause and effect in motion.

We must move to a new model of data sovereignty

As the digital currency markets meltdown and the price speculation frenzy fizzles out, many are returning to the question of what Bitcoin is really all about. Regular readers of CoinGeek will know that we’ve been telling you for years: Bitcoin is much more than a currency; it’s a ledger and data management tool that has the potential to stop corporations like Meta in their tracks and end their invasive business models.

Bitcoin (BSV) allows not only for peer-to-peer micropayments of fractions of a cent but also enables users to send data across the network; no data collection or invasive snooping is involved. Apps like Twetch and LaMint showcase what the future looks like, although it’s taking longer than is ideal for this to sink in with everyday internet users.

While it will take a while for the world to wake up to Bitcoin’s true potential, rest assured that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is well aware of it. That’s why his firm joined COPA to sue Dr. Craig Wright and try to pry open his intellectual property portfolio.

Like Facebook’s attempted rebrand, this endeavor will fail. In the meantime, things will likely keep getting worse for Meta.

Watch: The BSV Global Blockchain Convention presentation, Masters of the Metaverse