LIKE other big companies including Apple, Facebook set up offices in Ireland to take advantage of the country’s low corporate tax rate.

But thanks to stricter consumer privacy laws passed in the European Union — which is basically anathema to Facebook — the social media giant has had to reverse course to avoid extending the same privacy protections to you or me.

Facebook members outside the US and Canada, whether they know it or not, are currently governed by terms of service agreed with the company’s international headquarters in Ireland.

Two years ago the EU passed something called General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which gives EU residents greater access to and control over their own data.

It comes into force in Europe on May 25 and essentially sets a new global precedent for consumer rights over their data.

Thanks to Facebook’s tax reduction scheme, about 1.9 billion users would all benefit from the new European law.

Good news, right?

Facebook created a fake global HQ in Ireland to evade paying US taxes.



But Ireland is part of the EU.



That means that ALL Facebook users are now protected by the new EU's data privacy law GPDR going into effect soon. — John Robb (@johnrobb) April 19, 2018

Well, not so fast.

So that Facebook doesn’t have to extend the European laws to everyone, next month the company is shifting the data of 1.5 billion members in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America back to the US so they don’t fall under the GDPR mandate, Reuters first reported.

As a result, Facebook will have more leeway in how it handles data about those users because our profiles will now be on a site governed by US law where regulation isn’t as strict.

The European regulation also carried hefty fines. So companies like Facebook — and a raft of others — will be liable under GDPR for fines of up to 4 per cent of its global turnover (around $2 billion for Facebook) if it breaks the new data protection rules.

MARK ZUCKERBERG’S ABOUT-FACE

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled during two days of Senate testimony in the US last week, he said he thought Europe’s impending GDPR was a good thing.

“I think the GDPR in general is going to be a very positive step for the internet,” he said.

He had previously promised to apply the “spirit” of the legislation globally. But his actions betray a different intention.

Speaking to The Guardian, privacy researcher Lukasz Olejnik commented on the scale of Facebook’s effort to dodge the strict EU rules about user data.

“Moving around one-and-a-half billion users into other jurisdictions is not a simple copy-and-paste exercise,” he said.

“This is a major and unprecedented change in the data privacy landscape. The change will amount to the reduction of privacy guarantees and the rights of users, with a number of ramifications, notably for consent requirements. Users will clearly lose some existing rights, as US standards are lower than those in Europe.”

He said regulators in countries like Australia might want to consider taking the chance to act to enforce new consumer protections similar to Europe.

“Data protection authorities from the countries of the affected users, such as New Zealand and Australia, may want to reassess this situation and analyse the situation,” he said.

In a statement, Facebook said its rationale for the change was related to the European Union’s mandated privacy notices, “because EU law requires specific language”.

“We apply the same privacy protections everywhere, regardless of whether your agreement is with Facebook Inc or Facebook Ireland,” the company said.