Meta is considering leaving Europe, along with Instagram and Facebook, if it can no longer exchange data from European users with the United States due to the Schrems II decision, the tech giant stated in an SEC filing.

Facebook currently shares data about European users with its US operations, applications, and data centers and says that stopping such transatlantic data transfers will have a devastating impact on its targeted online advertisements capabilities (via ITWire).

Schrems II is a verdict issued by the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) back in July 2020 that invalidated the EU-US Data Protection Shield due to concerns around surveillance by US state and law enforcement agencies. Many companies that relied on the shield have been finding it difficult to manage the new verdict.

Facebook isn’t the sole affected by Schrems II as it is joined by every company that relied on basic data transfers to non-European countries. Some of the big names include Google, Microsoft, and Amazon whose cloud services form the backbone of most of the Western World’s Internet. The road to Schrems II will thus be long and slow as courts and industry navigate their way through the implications of the judgment.

Earlier, Google Analytics and Google Fonts had been taken to court where it was alleged that Google Fonts was sending personal data such as IP addresses to another service without permission and a valid reason to do so.

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