Also the language of the guideline, which the Chamber of Industry and Commerce had called “opaque” in its appearance order, as it uses terms like “contains”, “how” in the context of data that is shared with Facebook, Roy said.
In leading this investigation, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, together with its global colleagues in Germany, Italy and Turkey, examined whether the data exchange between WhatsApp and Facebook violated competition law.
Last year, the Federal Court of Justice came to the conclusion that Facebook plays a dominant role in the market for social networks and is abusing this position through its terms of use. The German competition authority has labeled Facebook’s data sharing practices abusive and banned it from combining user data collected by its subsidiaries such as WhatsApp, Oculus, Masquerade and Instagram without free consent – a decision currently under review by the European Court of Justice.
In 2017, the Italian competition authority fined WhatsApp € 3 million for forcing users to share their personal information on Facebook.
Earlier this year, the Turkish competition authority launched an investigation into the new WhatsApp privacy policy and whether the obligations associated with it violated the country’s antitrust rules.
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