Facebook accused over WhatsApp takeover

 

Facebook has been accused by the European Commission of misleading it during its investigation of Facebook's 2014 takeover of WhatsApp.

The Commission says Facebook misled it when the company said it was impossible to match users' Facebook and WhatsApp accounts.

But in August, WhatsApp said it would do just that, by linking users' phone numbers with their Facebook identities. The Commission says the ability to do that must have existed in 2014.

If it concludes that it was definitely misled, either by accident or design, the Commission could fine Facebook up to 1% of its turnover, which would amount to hundreds of millions of euros.

"Companies are obliged to give the Commission accurate information during merger investigations," said Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who is in charge of competition policy,

"In this specific case, the Commission's preliminary view is that Facebook gave us incorrect or misleading information during the investigation into its acquisition of WhatsApp."

Facebook is being asked to respond by 31 January 2017.

The Commission said its new probe would not undermine its previous decision to approve the $19bn (£16bn) merger of the two companies because it had not relied on the misleading information alone to approve the deal.

In September, the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information told Facebook to stop collecting and storing the data of German users of WhatsApp.

Then in November the UK's Information Commissioner followed suit and told Facebook not to use the data it had gathered from its WhatsApp users in the UK, saying the firm had not obtained valid consent for the move.