Turkey’s competition board fines Meta Platfoms $37.2M for data-sharing violations

In a recent decision, Turkey’s competition board fined Meta Platforms (previously known as Facebook Inc.) a total of 1.2 billion Turkish lira ($37.20 million) for violations related to data-sharing across its four major platforms: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. This penalty follows two separate investigations initiated by the board in December 2021 over suspected breaches of competition law arising from Meta’s practice of linking Threads and Instagram. An interim measure was previously put in place by the board in March 2022 to prevent unauthorized data sharing between Threads and Instagram. The board’s latest ruling imposes a sanction of 898 million Turkish lira for the administrative costs associated with the case, as well as a further fine of 336 million lira for a separate investigation into Threads. Previously, in January 2022, the board fined Meta $160,000 per day for failure to produce adequate documentation during a different probe, while imposing a daily penalty of 4.8 million lira in connection with a notification requirement regarding data-sharing. Both these fines expired on May 3rd. The board’s decision requires users to furnish express consent before merging personal data across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Users will receive notification about data usage and can modify their settings via a dedicated “Accounts Centre” feature. In 2022, the board also found Meta liable for violating competition laws, resulting in a fine of 346.72 million lira. ($1 equals 32.2540 Turkish liras). The report is authored by Ebru Tuncay with editing contributions from Burcu Karakas, Tuvan Gumrukcu, and Michael Erman.