Meta, through its two major social networks, Facebook and Instagram, plans to soon deploy Election Day Information (EDI) and Election Information Unit (VIU) functions across a large part of the European Union, two tools that you may have already imagined given the current situation will be deployed in view of the next European Parliament elections to be held in Spain next Sunday 9 June (the election days are divided between 6 and 9 different Member States).

However, their plans ran into an obstacle to development in our country, because, as we read in the official statement, The Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) banned the launch of Meta’s electoral functions in Spain. To this end, a preliminary injunction has been applied to prevent any movement in this regard for a maximum period of three months, during which Meta will not be able to offer these services for this electoral process.

The Spanish agency says it took the measure as a matter of urgency in response to exceptional circumstances, and is limited to the regulatory framework established by the GDPR for the entire territory of the European Union. In this regard, and although they do not elaborate, it is stated that his deployment “would violate the principles of legality of data protection, data minimization and retention period limitation«, something particularly serious considering that for this type of data (related to ideology and political affiliation) the European standard is quite restrictive.

The Agency for the Protection of Spanish Day focuses on the risk that Meta would provide data obtained through the Information and Electoral Information Unit on Election Day, available to third parties«would mean a disproportionate interference with the rights and freedoms of the parties involved«, something that ends by stating that «This loss of control poses a high risk that this data will be used by unknown responsible persons and for non-explicit purposes.«.

Meta has already replied that its tools are adapted to comply with GDPR, but that in any case will follow the decision of the Spanish regulator, even if they do not agree with it. Meta’s problem, which is particularly evident in the case of Facebook, is that the list of precedents is too broad and too negative for regulators to trust the social network’s good governance. In this regard, just think of the case of Cambridge Analytica, the enormous number of leaks of its users’ data that we have learned about, or the voluntary omission of the principles that they claimed to follow.