The Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) announced that it prohibited Meta from collecting and processing data from users of its social networks.

In this way, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is prohibited from applying the “Election Day Information” (EDI) and “Voter Information Unit” (VIU) functionalities that it intended to activate on the occasion of the elections in the region on 9J.

The AEPD’s decision is aimed at protecting users from “data collection, user profiling and the transfer of information to third parties”, preventing them from being used for unknown purposes.

According to the agency, the use of data by strangers and for non-explicit purposes “represents an action contrary to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and that would violate at least the data protection principles of legality, data minimization and limitation of the conservation period.”

By activating the aforementioned functionalities, Meta would seek to use the data of Facebook and Instagram users, “such as the user’s name, IP address, age and gender or information about how they interact with those functionalities about the EU elections”, which represents a risk to the rights and freedoms of users, as well as a disproportionate interference in the rights and freedoms of interested parties.

The AEPD has been working on protecting citizens’ data from the use of Big Data and artificial intelligence to collect information that would later be used to infer their political ideology and manipulate or generate disinformation in electoral processes.

M.Pino

Source: lavozdegalicia

(Reference image source: Unsplash+, in collaboration with Getty Images)

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La entrada European elections: Data Protection prohibits Meta from collecting user information apareció primero en Bitfinance.