A preliminary ruling by Ireland's data regulator in August to halt the transatlantic transfer of Facebook customer data threatened "devastating" and "irreversible" consequences to the U.S. company's business, a lawyer representing the firm said.
In a letter sent to Facebook, Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it was "proposing that data transfers be suspended," Paul Sreenan told Ireland's High Court as part of a legal challenge against the regulator's probe.
"We have made the point in our affidavit, that this would have devastating consequences for the plaintiff's business," Sreenan told the court, before describing the potential damage as "irreversible."
It comes as the State's data regulator fined Twitter €450,000 for a bug that made some private tweets public, in the first sanction against a US firm under a new European Union data privacy system.
The EU's General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) “One Stop Shop” regime makes the Data Protection Commission the lead regulator of Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Google in the bloc, due to the location of their EU headquarters.
GDPR has been in force since 2018, but the Twitter case is the first using a new dispute resolution system under which one lead national regulator makes a decision before consulting with the other EU national regulators.
More to follow.....
