Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws

theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-global-lobbying-campaign-against-data-privacy-lawsinvestment

Facebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor,

George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them

into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak

of internal documents has revealed.

The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a

secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an

attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India,

Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU. The documents include

details of how Facebook:

• Lobbied politicians across Europe in a strategic operation to head off “overly restrictive”

GDPR legislation. They include extraordinary claims that the Irish prime minister said his

country could exercise significant influence as president of the EU, promoting Facebook’s

interests even though technically it was supposed to remain neutral.

• Used chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s feminist memoir Lean In to “bond” with

female European commissioners it viewed as hostile.

• Threatened to withhold investment from countries unless they supported or passed

Facebook-friendly laws.

The documents appear to emanate from a court case against Facebook by the app

developer Six4Three in California, and reveal that Sandberg considered European data

protection legislation a “critical” threat to the company. A memo written after the Davos

economic summit in 2013 quotes Sandberg describing the “uphill battle” the company

faced in Europe on the “data and privacy front” and its “critical” efforts to head off “overly

prescriptive new laws”.

More: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-global-lobbying-campaign-against-data-privacy-laws-investment