Bloomberg Law
Sept. 9, 2016, 4:32 PM UTC

Facebook Grilled by EU’s Vestager Over WhatsApp Merger U-Turn

Bloomberg Media

By Aoife White and Peter Levring, Bloomberg News

Fresh from battles with Apple Inc. and Google, EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager is quizzing Facebook Inc. about a U-turn over its use of WhatsApp customer data just two years after EU watchdogs cleared the $19 billion takeover with no strings attached.

Vestager said officials were now “asking some follow-up questions” about privacy-policy changes announced last month that will allow advertising on the Facebook social network and Instagram photo-sharing site draw on data from WhatsApp. The EU cleared Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition in October 2014.

“That they didn’t merge data wasn’t the ...

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