It has been intimated that the Meta-owned company may suspend its operations in the country due to further regulatory demands. Its been just one week after Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission imposed a $220 million fine on WhatsApp for a data privacy breach.
These infringements included denying Nigerians the right to control their personal data, transferring and sharing Nigerian user data without authorization, discriminating against Nigerian users compared to users in other jurisdictions and abusing their dominant market position by forcing unfair privacy policies.
Apart from the fine penalty, the FCCPC has also directed WhatsApp to henceforth cease sharing user data with other Facebook companies and third parties without explicit user consent.
This decision by the FCCPC is said to have followed a 3-year investigation into Meta’s conduct and operations that took place between May 2021 and December 2023. However, it was discovered from the investigation that Meta parties engaged in multiple and repeated infringements of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act and the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation.
What Does Meta-owned Whatsapp Have to Say?
The Meta-owned company responded in an email message to The PUNCH on Thursday, said the imposed penalty may affect services rendered by messaging platform in the country. And this is solely because WhatsApp relies on limited data infrastructure from its parent company to run its service and keep users safe and that it would be impossible to provide WhatsApp in Nigeria, or globally, without Meta’s infrastructure.
It further appealed that this order contains multiple inaccuracies and misrepresents how WhatsApp works and they are urgently appealing the order to avoid any impact to users.