EU: Commission could have a Facebook decision for privacy cases

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has the power to levy billions of euros in fines and aims to send proposed decisions to other EU regulators by the end of September.

The Journal reported that The European Union could begin to hit Facebook with decisions under the bloc’s new privacy law by the end of the year, raising the specter of billions of euros in fines and orders to change business practices.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission claims it is nearing the end of its investigations in some of the 11 cases it has opened into the tech giant under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

The Irish regulator has given Facebook copies of its final investigative reports for some cases, and plans to begin drafting decisions in coming weeks, according to Graham Doyle, a spokesman for the regulator. Ireland aims to send at least some draft decisions, along with any proposed fines and sanctions, to the EU’s 27 other national privacy regulators by the end of September, Mr. Doyle added.

The sending of those draft decisions will kick off an EU approval process that could stretch to the end of the year or into the beginning of 2020, European privacy officials say.