• by Colin Kirkland , May 31, 2024

An order from Spain’s local data-protection authority, the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD), will suspend Meta from launching two planned products in Spain that would collect data on voters in the region during the upcoming European Elections due to privacy concerns.

The precautionary measure will go into effect immediately, suspending Meta's implementation of its “Election Day Information” (EDI) and “Voter Information Unit” (VIU), and the collection and processing of data involved in their use across Facebook and Instagram for the next three months.

According to the AEPD, Meta's tools would collect personal data such as voters' usernames, IP addresses, ages and gender, ultimately creating more complex, detailed profiles, which the agency believes would put the rights and freedoms of those Instagram and Facebook users at risk.

“This loss of control represents a high risk that this data will be used by unknown parties and for non-explicit purposes,” the AEPD said in a statement translated from English, adding that the collections of users' ages was not justified due to the lack of a reliable age-verification mechanism in the Meta-owned and operated social-media apps.

Overall, the AEPD sees Meta's tools as potentially violating the Spanish data protection regulation (GDPR) -- which allows the AEPD to act on local concerns -- based on its data protection principles, calling the treatment of interaction data as “totally disproportionate in relation to the supposed purpose of informing about the elections.”

Meta said that it disagrees with the AEPD's order, but will still comply, stating that its election tools are designed to “respect users' privacy and comply with the GDPR.”