EU court adviser: Competition bodies may consider data protection breaches in their probes
A non-binding opinion by the advocate general, an influential adviser to the EU’s top court, might open the door for antitrust watchdogs to assess compliance with data protection rules in future investigations.
In the opinion for the European Court of Justice delivered on 20 September, Advocate General Athanasios Rantos said that while the competition authorities do not have direct jurisdiction regarding the endorsement of the GDPR, the EU’s data privacy regulation, they may still consider them in exercising their powers.
The case that prompted the court’s action regards a probe of the German federal competition authority, which prohibited Meta-owned platform Facebook from processing personal data according to its terms of services as it failed to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation.
For the Bundeskartellamt, one of Europe’s most influential antitrust authorities, Facebook’s violation of the EU’s data protection rulebook constituted an abuse of the dominant position that the social network enjoyed in Germany.
