Facebook has warned that overlapping national probes into its privacy policy could severely endanger the European Union’s economy if such a fragmented strategy is continued and applied to other businesses.

The social networking company also warned that the high cost of compliance with multiple national laws, rather than with an overarching EU regime, could cause it to introduce new features more slowly or not at all.

Data protection authorities from Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany in February formed a task force to deal with Facebook’s new privacy policy, introduced late January. They suspect that the new policy violates EU privacy laws. French, Spanish and Italian authorities later joined the group.

This fragmentation of regulatory action, though, can be bad for the EU, according to Facebook. “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,” Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy in Europe, wrote in an opinion column in The Financial Times.

Read the Full Article: Source – PC World
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2916592/facebook-under-siege-slams-european-privacy-regulators.html

source not found