A major dispute over personal data has been ongoing between the European Union and the United States in recent years. This situation is triggered especially by companies such as US technology giants Meta, Apple and Microsoft transferring user data to the USA instead of keeping it in Europe. Finally, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, received a historic fine of 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) from the European Union.
The EU's data protection rules, national security laws and other regulations force companies to store data in the country where it was collected, rather than allowing it to move freely to data centers around the world.
For example, if Facebook wants to create ads or pages accordingly by processing the personal data of users in Turkey, the sites they visit or the news they click on, it will need to keep and process this data on servers it will open in Turkey. Because of the many incidents that took place in the past and were brought to the US judiciary, it brings with it the fear that the data may be presented to intelligence services such as NSA.
The decision taken by the EU today is a record-breaking fine imposed within the scope of GDPR. The reason for this was that Meta's chief financial officer, Susan Li, said in a statement to investors last month that approximately 10 percent of worldwide advertising revenue comes from ads aimed at Facebook users in EU countries. This corresponds to 11.7 billion dollars of approximately 117 billion dollars.