Facebook to implement EU privacy standards globally

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the company's intention to apply Europe's hard-core data protection standards across its entire global network. The new regulation comes into force in May and will give Americans and other Facebook users outside of the European Union access to some of the world's toughest data protection rules.

His commitment would go further than current privacy standards within the U.S., where congressional efforts to pass an online privacy law failed to materialise. It also marks a change from Facebook’s previous plans, in which only part of Europe’s data protection overhaul was expected to apply outside the EU.

Last month, Emily Sharpe, a London-based privacy and public policy manager at Facebook, said that certain features designed to comply with Europe’s upcoming rules would be rolled out globally, but other regulatory steps required to gain users’ online consent, particularly around the collection of their sensitive data like political or religious affiliation, was expected to only apply within the European Union.