MADRID (Reuters) -Spanish data protection watchdog AEPD has ordered the provisional suspension of two planned Meta products to be deployed on social media platforms Instagram and Facebook in the upcoming European elections, it said on Friday.
The tools, called ‘Election Day Information’ (EDI) and ‘Voter Information Unit’ (VIU), may violate Spain’s Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), AEPD said.
“Our election tools are expressly designed to respect user privacy and comply with GDPR. While we disagree with the AEPD’s assessment in this case, we have cooperated with their request,” a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.
According to the agency, Meta said the intention is that all eligible Instagram and Facebook users in the European Union will receive notifications from VIU and EDI reminding them to vote.
“The data processing envisaged by Meta would be contrary to Spanish data protection regulations and would at least be contrary to the data protection principles of lawfulness, data minimization and limitation of the retention period,” the AEPD said in a statement.
It added that Meta selected eligible voters based on data in users’ profiles about their place of residence, as well as their IP addresses. But the only condition to be allowed to vote in the European elections is that you are an adult citizen of one of the EU member states.
The AEPD said this data processing was “unnecessary, disproportionate and excessive” as it disregarded EU citizens living abroad and targeted citizens of non-EU countries located in Europe.
The agency added that collecting data on users’ ages was not justified because there was no reliable mechanism to verify their self-reported ages, and the treatment of interaction data was “totally disproportionate to the supposed purpose of informing about the elections”. .
The watchdog said Meta had not justified the need to store the data after the election, which “reveals an additional purpose for the processing”.
(Reporting by David Latona; Editing by Inti Landauro and Giles Elgood)
