Meta has been hit with a €1.2bn advantageous by the EU and ordered to droop transfers of person knowledge to the US, within the largest penalty to be imposed towards a Big Tech agency within the bloc over privateness violations.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which oversees the General Data Protection Regulation, on Monday handed down the advantageous for Meta, saying that Facebook had violated its guidelines requiring platforms to make sure knowledge transfers from Europe to the US had acceptable safeguards in place.

Instead, the DPC discovered that the platform’s EU-US knowledge flows had relied on contractual clauses that “did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms” of customers.

Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of worldwide affairs, stated: “ We are . . . disappointed to have been singled out when using the same legal mechanism as thousands of other companies looking to provide services in Europe.”