The top privacy regulator of the European Union said today that the potential risks involved in the $19 billion proposed merger deal between Facebook Inc and WhatsApp Inc could send authorities to conduct probes to determine whether the consolidation will compromise the mobile-messaging startup's client data.
In an interview by Bloomberg, Jacob Kohnstamm, who currently leads Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, said that its colleagues in other countries in the Euro Zone that could have heard about the merger may decide to conduct its own research. Moreover, he told the news agency that around 28 data protection regulators could jointly launched an investigation regarding the potential risks of the proposed merger. Kohnstamm reasoned that the need to probe WhatsApp, who has a 450-million client base, is not that established in Europe when compared to Facebook.
According to Kohnstamm, the main concern of the privacy regulators in WhatsApp is the data collection from users' address books on their phones. He said that under Dutch and European law, the collection of data done on people's phone when downloading the mobile messaging app is not compliant as the database will be vulnerable to scammers or opportunity-takers who wish to use the data for an entirely different purpose. Kohnstamm added that the decision stemming from the probe conducted by the privacy regulators could include a fine based on Dutch law and will be made known over the course of this year.
Facebook has been getting flak from privacy regulators all over the world in the last few years due to measures that were deemed to be inadequate to protect privacy data. In 2012, Bloomberg said that the social media giant had to delete data it had collected for its facial recognition program following a probe done by an Irish privacy regulator.
EU data protection law specialist Wim Nauwelaerts at Hunton & Williams LLP in Brussels said about Facebook's impending merger with WhatsApp, "Facebook is not only buying a popular messaging app, it is also acquiring the addresses and telephone numbers of 450 million users worldwide. Many of these users are already signed up to Facebook, so through this deal Facebook will be able to build complete profiles on users" and "this begs the question to what extent Facebook intends to ‘monetize' the data."
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