The popular messaging app, WhatsApp, fresh from a skirmish with regulators in Germany, now faces a fresh probe in Italy.
It was exactly a year ago that David Marcus, Vice President of Messaging Products at Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) said that “WhatsApp is growing very nicely in developing countries. (Facebook) Messenger is focussed on developed countries. We don’t really overlap that much.”
But the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messenger, far from secondary in developed countries, is influential enough that EU nation after EU nation appears to feel the need to take a pop at it.
Following Apple Inc’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) challenge to the FBI investigation of an iPhone owned by a San Bernardino shooting suspect earlier this year, WhatsApp made headlines for encrypting all its messages going forward in an act of defiance to the FBI.
It could be argued that as a pervasive social media WhatsApp offers a fresh challenge to Europe, after questions were raised over Google’s reach (NASDAQ:GOOGL).
Italy’s competition watchdog has opened up an anti-trust investigation into WhatsApp for a possible violation of consumer protection laws. Rome wants to establish whether the US messaging service forces users to hand over personal data to parent Facebook.
The investigation, announced on Friday, comes as WhatsApp has been seeking to fend off criticism of its privacy policy, saying it had no intention of gaining control of its users’ information.
WhatsApp has already faced scrutiny in Germany, where authorities banned Facebook from collecting and storing data from the messaging service’s 35mln users in the EU’s largest economy.
It is therefore bewildering why a separate case is being launched in Italy to examine the same, and not EU-wide.
Italian regulators want to know whether or not WhatsApp forces customers to hand over personal data to Facebook when they accept the terms and conditions of the user contract.
Facebook shares were up 1.4% at $131.51 on Friday.