On Tuesday the first levy against an American Tech Company, under the current European Union regulation on data security, was imposed on Twitter by Irish regulatory authorities Twitter at $547,000 for its handling of privacy breaches.
The EUR 450,000 fine was a landmark in implementing the General Data Security Legislation of the EU, which was introduced in 2018 in order to allow Europeans greater control of their online data.
Twitter also said that the Ireland Data Protection Commission has taken too long to warn authorities of a bug that has publicly made private tweets available to other users. Between September 2017 and January 2019, officials said the issue affected at least 88,726 European users.
About two years after the infringement began in January 2019, the Irish Regulator confirmed the sanction. The Commission will enforce Twitter and other titans of Silicon Valley’s data privacy rules, whose offices are in Ireland, such as Google and Apple.
The Twitter case was first developed under EU data law to conduct a dispute settlement mechanism which involves a decision by the heads of regulators and other national regulators.
After other authorities had objected to the original decision, Ireland agreed before the European Data Security Commission. Much of the judgments were endorsed but Ireland was directed to raise the fine. The final penalty was called “efficient, proportionate and deterrent” by Irish regulators.
Twitter said the fine was triggered by its inability in 72 hours after it heard of the issue to alert authorities about the error. Between Christmas and New Year holidays in 2018, the corporation headquartered in San Francisco blamed the delay for personnel problems.
“We made changes so that all subsequent incidents were reported to the [Commission for Data Protection] in due course,” said Daniel Curran, Chief Privacy Officer of Twitter and the Global Data Protection Officer. “We accept responsibility for the error and remain fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy and data, including through our efforts to inform the public quickly and transparently about any problems occurring.”
