EU charges Facebook with giving 'misleading' information over WhatsApp

The European Commission (EC) has filed charges against Facebook for providing “misleading” information in the run-up to the social network’s acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp after its data-sharing change in August.

The charges will not have an affect on the approval of the $22 billion merger and is being treated completely separately to other European cases against Facebook, but could lead to Facebook being fined up to 1% of its global turnover in 2014 when the merger was approved, which was greater than $10 billion for the first time. The European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said, “Our timely and effective review of mergers depends on the accuracy of the information provided by the companies involved. In this specific case, the commission’s preliminary view is that Facebook gave us incorrect or misleading information during the investigation into its acquisition of WhatsApp. Facebook now has the opportunity to respond.” The commission said that Facebook informed regulators that it would not be able to perform automated matching between user-held Facebook accounts and WhatsApp accounts. However, Facebook’s privacy policy change for WhatsApp in August, for which the EC was notified in January, specifically enabled automated matching and data sharing after technical changes, including one for Apple and its iOS, allowed the matching of the majority of accounts not using a phone number with Facebook.''