The Dutch government does not have to stop using Facebook for the time being. Meta is said to have recently announced that it is prepared to meet the government's privacy concerns, after the company first indicated several times that it did not want to cooperate on a solution.
Outgoing State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen of Digitalization said in an answer to parliamentary questions that the ministry has recently started 'concrete consultations' with Meta about the previously identified privacy risks at Facebook. According to Van Huffelen, the tech giant has 'indicated that it wants to reach an agreement with us'. Since these are private conversations, no substantive information is shared. The State Secretary does say that the intention is for the next cabinet to definitively 'bring to a successful conclusion' the discussions with Meta.
In April, the State Secretary announced that the central government may soon have to stop using Facebook. The ministry is said to have held several discussions with Meta in 2023, in the hope that the company would make agreements to mitigate privacy risks. However, the company refused to cooperate with requests for information and to resolve the identified risks.
The State Secretary then announced that he wanted to talk to Meta one last time. Van Huffelen threatened to remove the government from Facebook if the company did not respond to privacy concerns again. She now tells NRC that Meta 'may have wanted to answer our questions' this time, but that the tech giant first wanted the State Secretary to sign a confidentiality statement in which she would promise not to talk about their conversations in public. “Well, of course I wasn't going to do that,” she told the newspaper.
The privacy concerns arise from a study conducted in 2022 by the Dutch Data Protection Authority on behalf of the government. The AP concluded that government organizations 'should not use Facebook if it is unclear what happens to the personal data of visitors to their Facebook page'. In the study, the Dutch Data Protection Authority found seven 'high privacy risks' when using Pages. For example, Facebook is insufficiently transparent about what data it collects and what messages it shows and there is a 'loss of control due to unlawful processing'.
Facebook also uses 'tracking cookies in a misleading way' and collects them platform data of citizens who have not given permission for this themselves. “Data about the behavior of page visitors is also collected without sufficient insight into the logic of using that data to display personalized messages, recommended other content and advertisements. Finally, there are concerns about the transfer of personal data to third parties countries and third parties,” Van Huffelen said last April. The AP advised the government to stop using Facebook if these risks cannot be removed.
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