Facebook Gets Boost in Bid to Stall EU’s Antitrust Data Demands

Stephanie Bodoni, Bloomberg News

The website home screen for Facebook is displayed on a laptop computer in an arranged photograph taken in Little Falls, New Jersey, U.S., on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020. Facebook Inc. is tightening its rules on content concerning the U.S. presidential election next month, including instituting a temporary ban on political ads when voting ends, as it braces for a contentious night that may not end with a definitive winner. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. may be able to slow down European Union investigators’ demands to turn over vast amounts of data after an EU court ruling that potentially frustrates efforts to build an antitrust case against the U.S. tech giant.

The European Commission can’t force the social network giant to hand over potentially sensitive information without a detailed review, Marc van der Woude, president of the EU General Court said in a decision Thursday. While the court didn’t completely suspend the EU’s information requests, it told regulators to work with Facebook in identifying which data is sensitive and to store the information in a “virtual data room.”

“The members of the team responsible for the investigation shall examine and select the documents in question,” while giving Facebook lawyers “the opportunity to comment on them before the documents considered relevant are placed on the file,” van der Woude said in the court order.

The EU last year started examining Facebook’s sales platform and how it uses data from apps, as part of a broader crackdown on Silicon Valley. The EU is also looking at how Amazon.com Inc. collects data from retailers through its platform and investigations into Apple Inc.’s app store. Regulators can require companies to give documents mentioning certain keywords under threat of fines.

Facebook said in a statement that it particularly welcomed the court’s assessment “that highly personal and irrelevant information enjoy strong legal protections which need to be respected in the commission’s ongoing investigation.”

“In the meantime, we continue to cooperate with the commission and have already provided it with over a million documents,” the company said.

Facebook sued the Brussels-based commission in July, citing “the exceptionally broad nature” of the EU’s orders. It also filed two challenges seeking a court suspension of the EU data demands.

The EU’s demands impose on Facebook “a positive obligation to search for all of its electronic files on the basis of broad search terms and to communicate to the commission the documents responding to those search terms, even if those documents contain sensitive personal data,” the court decided. Facebook “correctly claims that that obligation requires it to process sensitive personal data.”

The decision on so-called interim measures can be appealed. Facebook’s main appeals over the legality of the EU’s demands remain pending.

The cases are T-451/20 and T-452/20 Facebook Ireland v Commission.