Twitter’s cross-border case will be the first big tech GDPR case and its decision may come out soon

In 2019, Twitter had publicly disclosed that a bug in its ‘Protect your tweets’ feature may have exposed its users who applied the feature on their Android app to the public internet. Those users may have applied this feature to protect their tweets from becoming public, but sadly, the bug may have exposed all their data to the public internet going as far back as 2014.

Now, European Union started a new regime for data protection from May 2018, and all data protection breaches from 2014 to 2019 are included and come under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Amongst the European Union, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) is the lead supervisory authority for the Twitter data breach case. They presented a draft decision to the GDPR, but due to the cross-border nature of the case, all European Union data protection authorities and agencies raised some objections to the draft decision of the Irish supervisory authority, and it all resulted in a dispute in the resolution process related to all cross-border cases that come under GDPR.

European Data Protection Board (EDPB) is an authority that coordinates all the regulatory activities across the entire European Union. Recently, this EDPB has taken a binding decision and has adopted its first Article 65 to decide about the penalty for Twitter. And they will soon notify the Irish supervisory authority about it too. Article 65 refers to the mechanism which is used to settle a disagreement between the European Union’s data supervisors. Now that EDPB has taken this decision, it means that at least around two-thirds of the EU data supervising authorities would have backed it up and would have agreed to the settlement.

Graham Doyle, the deputy commissioner of Ireland has recently confirmed that they have been informed about EDPB’s Article 65 decision. But he did not comment any further about Ireland’s Data Protection Commission’s stance. But the Iris DPC has a month to issue a final verdict. Irish supervisory authority’s decision will be based on and in compliance with the EDPB’s decision, and it will be addressed to the controller. Without any undue delay now, the EDPB expects the Irish supervisory authority to notify them of their final decision.

Now, it is not known whether Twitter will face a fine or some other form of penalty, but we will get to know about it soon enough.


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