The EU and UK launched formal antitrust investigations into Facebook yesterday to determine if the world’s largest social network is using customers’ data to unfairly compete with advertisers, in a new threat to its business model. The European Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) separately said they would investigate whether Facebook misuses its vast trove of data, gathered from the near seven million companies thatadvertise on Facebook Marketplace. The opening of European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s first antitrust probe into the world’s largest social network marks her latest fight with one of the US tech giants. The EU probe confirmed what a person familiar with the situation told Reuters on May 26. Launched in 2016, Facebook Marketplace is used by 800 million Facebook users in 70 countries to buy and sell items and has been under EU scrutiny since 2019.

Source: Irish Independent June 04, 2021 12:22 UTC