While the world waits in anticipation for the cage fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg the fight for social media users is already well under way.

Due to Musk’s chaotic and seemingly arbitrary decision-making at Twitter, Zuckerberg – through Meta – has launched Threads. But this has not come without its difficulties. Meta delayed the launch of Threads in the EU apparently due to concerns over data laws. Despite some reports, Threads hasn’t actually been blocked in the EU. Meta has simply informed the Irish Data Protection Commission that it won’t launch in the EU yet because it is confused over the impact of the EU Digital Markets Act. So, not GDPR then.

Meta is no stranger to scrutiny over its data practices. In May 2023, it received the largest-ever GDPR fine: $1.2bn by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. You can’t blame them for threading, er, treading carefully to ensure they have everything in order before they launch in the EU. It seems Brexit and the different direction the UK is taking over data issues is comfort enough for them to launch in the UK.

Others have raised concerns too. For example, Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and global privacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center has said: “I haven’t seen any evidence that Meta is being transparent about what it will do with sensitive personal data.”

Carissa Veliz, an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford, has also questioned Meta’s collection of sensitive data.

Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez, said the company internally filters out sensitive data including health information, sexual orientation and religious views from being used in advertising.

If you need advice, contact me at +44 20 3824 9748 or fjennings@hcrlaw.com.