The world’s largest social network has a message for the European Union: stay the course or risk hurting our users.

In a lengthy editorial published Wednesday, Facebook’s vice president of public policy in Europe, Richard Allan, issued a retort to European regulators who have started investigations into the company’s privacy practices. Allan argues that the many countries now investigating Facebook are undermining European law and could ultimately hurt both Facebook’s users and smaller Internet companies trying to become the next Facebook.

“National regulation would pose serious obstacles,” Allan wrote. “Facebook’s costs would increase, and people in Europe would notice new features arriving more slowly, or not at all. The biggest victims would be smaller European companies. The next big thing might never see the light of day.”

Some EU countries are at odds with Facebook — which has 1.4 billion users worldwide, including 83 percent active outside the US and Canada — over how regulations should be handled in the euro zone. Earlier this month, privacy regulators in France, Spain, Italy and elsewhere launched probes into how Facebook collects user data. They’re most interested in how Facebook combines its own information with that from the other companies it owns, like photo-sharing service Instagram, as well as how it tracks people after they have used Facebook’s “like” button.

Read the Full Article: Source – c|net
http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-says-eus-privacy-investigations-hurt-innovation-economy/

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