Threads Faces Privacy Challenges in European Union

Threads, Instagram’s “text-based conversation app” and competitor of Twitter is facing privacy challenges in European Union. The launch of Threads is on hold in European Union for now over some privacy concerns.

Meta launched Threads, on the evening of Wednesday, 5th July which is a messaging app similar to Twitter. It is supposed to give tough competition to its competitor, Twitter. A number of users were fleeing from the globally renowned social media platform, Twitter after the recent changes made by Elon Musk. These changes were highly impacting the user experience and sentiments. To accommodate these users’ desires and need Meta stepped into the market and launched Threads App.  

Soon after the announcement of its release, this app appeared on Appstore and Playstore to download for free. The privacy section of the app contains some points that indicate that the new app will collect user data like finances, health, contacts, browsing history, usage data, purchases, search history, and other related sensitive information.

By observing these privacy concerns, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) decided that the release will not take place in the EU for now and blocking Threads from being launched reported by Irish Independent. Earlier, the release of Google’s Chatbot Bard was blocked due to the same privacy concerns.

European Union maintains tight control over the use of users’ sensitive data for the purpose of ads, marketing, and other purposes. As per the EU law consent is needed to utilize any user’s data.  

Countries are very cautious about data protection and trying their best to remain protected from these ongoing data breaches. Currently, concerns have been raised about the use of user data for the training of AI bots. Meta needs to find a way to deal with the privacy concerns of the European Union region. European Union is a huge market to cover and cannot be ignored.