Tech giants must collect less data, EU regulators say

Facebook, Amazon and Google may be forced to review their business models in Europe as German and Belgian regulators are challenging them over competition and copyright.

On Thursday, Germany’s Federal Cartel office, the country’s antitrust watchdog, urged Facebook to reduce its collection of huge amounts of data.

Following an interim ruling in 2017, the German authorities said Facebook had been allowed to “limitlessly amass every kind of data generated by using third-party websites and merge it with the user’s Facebook account [including] WhatsApp or Instagram”.

Now, Facebook will only continue gathering so much data from users beyond its app and website if it gets individuals’ consent. The ruling only applies to the firm's activities in Germany but could influence other regulators.

EU competition regulators said data hoarding could be considered anti-competitive and EU commissioner Margrethe Vestager put together a task force of academics to produce a report on the issue by April.

“We’re already looking very closely at whether companies are using their control of data to harm competition. We need to be sure that the competition rules are ready for a world where data becomes even more vital,” said Ms Vestager on Monday.

“We can choose products from millions of sellers, find news from every country in the world. But all those sites are funnelled to us through just a handful of platforms — the search engines that [help] us find different offers for a product, the online marketplaces where buyers meet sellers, the news aggregators that collect stories from around the web,” she added referring to tech companies.

EU governments in Brussels on Friday will try to reach a deal on how to update Europe’s copyright rules.