Facebook will exclude 1.5 billion users from new data privacy protections

Next month the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect, which will give European Facebook users–and any users of Facebook who are subject to Facebook’s terms of services in Ireland–much more control over what data Facebook can access and store about them. Right now, all European Facebook users and Facebook users in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America are governed by the TOS with the company’s international headquarters in Ireland. That means 1.5 billion users of Facebook who live outside Europe would nonetheless be protected by the GDPR.

But as Reuters reports, Facebook will be updating its TOS with users in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America to inform them that they will now be governed under the terms of service users are in America, which is outside of the GDPR’s reach. The change will allow Facebook to skirt the privacy protections 1.5 billion of its users would have been granted in just a month’s time when the GDPR goes into effect. In other words, despite Facebook’s assertions in recent weeks that it cares deeply about protecting its customer’s data, it’s not going to let a new pesky data protection privacy law get in the way of collecting as much data about their users as possible.