German antitrust watchdog can add privacy breaches to Meta probe, EU court says

Antitrust authorities can check whether companies such as Meta Platforms comply with EU data protection rules during their investigations, Europe’s top court said on Tuesday, a move likely to broaden regulators’ scrutiny of Big Tech.

The case before the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) concerns a 2019 German cartel office order to Meta to stop collecting users’ data without their consent as such a practice constituted an abuse of its market power.