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Comment by Grollicus | Hacker News Reader

If I remember correctly Facebook was only allowed to buy Whatsapp in France because they promised not to share user data between the two services. The German data protection agency basically didn't say anything only because the french said it already.

Now Facebook does it's mix-and-mash anyways.

I'd have expected to hear something out of France about this. Did I just miss it?

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Facebook has already been fined by the European commission in 2017 to the tune of 110M Euros over this. It is a drop in the bucket compared to the billions Facebook paid for WhatsApp though - so small one suspect Facebook might have already factored it into the cost of the acquisition.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/18/facebook-fi...

Isn't the point of fines to punish past bad behaviour? Why aren't there escalating fines if a company continues to not comply with rulings? I mean it is not a one time thing that can't be changed.

Sorry for asking, I know next to nothing about how these laws work.

Too many anti-trust agencies seem to have a "Oh well, what's done is done, what can you do now?!" attitude towards violations.

If one of the primary conditions of the merger was that WhatsApp was not allowed to share user data with FB, and then FB goes ahead and does it anyway (even before ever prompting users to agree with this), then that should be all the reason the agencies need to order the split of WhatsApp from Facebook.

Because they don't take this seriously enough is exactly why Facebook is now attempting to further integrate Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, so that a few years down the road when the shit will really hit the fan, FB would be able to claim that the disintegration of the services is "impossible" at that point and/or get those platforms' users to raise hell against their politicians for attempting to do that.

Anti-trust is vague and arbitrary. Companies can’t avoid violation because it’s not clear what a violation actually is.

> Now Facebook does it's mix-and-mash anyways.

Did they? I thought it was just under discussion.

They have been doing it to a smaller extent outside the EU, with contacts data being shared between WhatsApp and Facebook. Therefore if you have the Facebook app installed as well as WhatsApp, every contact in Facebook and WhatsApp will be integrated as best as possible.

Which actually shows that European antitrust has some power. Facebook seems to be very aware that they can't get away (or at least pay more) with the same things in the EU as outside of it.

Obviously frustrating for non-EU citizens but the only thing helping here will be more GDPR-like laws across the globe. If enough nations enact regulation like this, it'll be cheaper for a company to follow it globally.

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