A PYMNTS Company

EU: Facebook tells regulators “data is complicated”

By  |  December 2, 2019

Facebook has a message for regulators and policy makers concerned about the company’s harvesting of user information: don’t treat data as a simple resource like oil.
Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, said Monday that antitrust officials should be careful not to treat data like other commodities that could be monopolized, but rather as something more complex that can be shared and kept at the same time.

    Get the Full Story

    Complete the form to unlock this article and enjoy unlimited free access to all PYMNTS content — no additional logins required.

    yesSubscribe to our daily newsletter, PYMNTS Today.

    By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.

    “We think it is legitimate to ask profound questions about how data is held,” Mr. Clegg said at a briefing with journalists on Monday. But he added that officials defining what he called the orthodoxy of competition policy should “reconfigure old concepts” and “relinquish themselves of the idea that [using data] is the same as using finite resources in finite, one-off ways.”

    We’d love to be your preferred source for news.

    Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!

    Add as Preferred Source

    Mr. Clegg’s statement comes as tech companies including Facebook and Alphabet Google face growing antitrust scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic for their control and use of user data. In the US, both the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are probing the companies.

    The European Commission, the European Union’s antitrust enforcer, is also in the early stages of probes into how both Google and Facebook gather and monetize data about their users for advertising purposes, according to a commission spokeswoman.

    Full Content: Wall Street Journal

    Want more news? Subscribe to CPI’s free daily newsletter for more headlines and updates on antitrust developments around the world.