Welcome back. This is Emlex's weekly podcast. My name is James Panicki coming to you from Melbourne, Australia. And as usual, we'll be covering the big stories of the moment with the assistance of our team of reporters around the world.

It's great to have your company today.

And there's been no bigger story over the past week than the imposition of a 1.3 billion US dollar fine on meta platforms.

It's the largest penalty issued to date under the European

Union's General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. But don't let the dollar figure distract you.

Meta will be able to afford it. In fact, the decision by European privacy enforcers is far more

significant than a penalty because it could force Facebook to suspend transfers of personal data from the EU to the US.

And that goes to the heart of the social media platform's business model.

All of this unfolded on the fifth anniversary of the GDPR's implementation, so an enforcement announcement oozing with symbolism. And on today's podcast,

we'll be covering it all, the decision by the Irish data watchdog, the future of transatlantic

data exchanges, and in just over 10 minutes from now, we'll be joined by MNX's Mike Swift in Silicon

Valley to talk about the GDPR's global impact.

First up, though, our reporters Sam Clark and Matthew Newman have been covering recent developments

with their usual panache, and they join me now from our officers in Brussels.

So Sam, firstly, tell us something about what has been described as the most consequential

GDPR enforcement action that could have been taken.

Walk us through that decision. Yeah, so probably the first thing to say is that it's been a long

time coming. People have been waiting for this in one form or another for nearly a decade now,

so that's kind of some context for it. The decision itself, there's three main aspects to it.

So META has been told to suspend data transfers through its Facebook service from the EU to the US.

It's been told to effectively delete data that it's sent from the EU to the US since July 2020, since the date of the Schrems 2 decision, which GDPR nerds will know all about.

And the third part is a 1.2 billion euro fine, which is the highest so far under the GDPR by quite a long way.

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