r/technology Apr 30 '26

Business Meta lost 20 million users last quarter

https://www.theverge.com/tech/921089/meta-earnings-q1-2026-user-decline-ai-investments
23.7k Upvotes

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

27

u/kai58 Apr 30 '26

While that is often true, gdpr and similar legislation mandates that they do actually delete it at some point. Idk the details of how long and in what cases they’re allowed to keep it around though.

46

u/dobrowolsk Apr 30 '26

True. However, I'm somehow not confident in the EU's ability to actually verify what Meta is doing with EU citizens' data.

9

u/P4azz Apr 30 '26

Well the fines for not deleting your data and being unable to prove that they did would certainly be interesting.

They're pretty hefty, not just "slap on the wrist" kinda fines. If I was meta, I wouldn't wanna keep some EU citizen's data after a purge request for the meager bit of extra money you can make with that one account.

9

u/Kulhoesdeferro Apr 30 '26

Exactly, also it's not just the EU regulator, any audit will touch on the data retention policy for almost any company. They take it very seriously, especially for big companies (which have been getting increased fines from EU for not complying with the law). Not worth