Threads, the competitor to Twitter created by Meta, will not arrive in France immediately. A spokesperson for the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said the regulator had been contacted in relation to this new service. If it will obviously be launched tomorrow in several countries, it cannot be deployed in the European Union for the moment. Meta must indeed follow the GDPR and review the data it intends to collect.
Unsurprisingly, Meta has planned to be very aggressive in its collection of personal information. The application file is already online on the American App Store, and the list of data collected is as long as a day without bread. In the United States, Threads can notably collect information on the user’s health, financial data, browsing history, location, purchases or contacts.
Another problem blocking a launch in Europe would come from the fact that Threads was designed to import data from Instagram, potentially for advertising purposes. This kind of mix does not please the European Union at all, which for example prevented Meta from using Facebook / Instagram user data for advertisements on WhatsApp.
The Irish Independent reports that the regulator hasn’t actively blocked the service, but Meta simply has no plans to launch in Europe yet. This explains why Threads was not posted on the French App Store. The platform should, however, be accessible in the UK, which is not fully governed by the GDPR.
If this strong interest in personal data is not a surprise coming from Meta, such a blocking in the EU could somewhat taint its communication. Threads should be the group’s first social network to be compatible with decentralized Fediverse platforms like Mastodon. This is a point on which Meta will surely play, selling its platform as more open than the competition. However, this will not prevent it from scrutinizing the slightest actions of users.
Faced with the multiple setbacks of Twitter, Meta has a boulevard to launch its new platform. Many users plan to leave Twitter following recent changes: Elon Musk, for example, announced a restriction on the number of readable tweets per day, while the Tweetdeck tool will become payable. Threads could pick up quite a few malcontents… but not in Europe yet.
This article is originally published on igen.fr
