Threads, an alternative and competitor to Twitter, will not be available in Europe for now. This may be because the app collects too much privacy-sensitive information. Whether and when Threads will come to the European continent is unknown.
A Data Protection Commission (DPC) spokesperson confirms this to the Irish newspaper Independent.
Here’s what you need to know about Threads
Meta recently announced that it wants to compete with Twitter. For this, Facebook’s parent company has developed its own Threads application. Like the microblogging service, Threads allows users to post short messages on various topics. Others can comment on this content or share it with their followers.
Threads is designed to import data from Instagram users. In addition to name and profile information, the app collects various privacy-sensitive details from users. Think of health data, financial information, purchase history, search and browsing history and location data. Meta can use this mountain of data to serve targeted ads to users.
Threads is slated to launch this week in the United States and the United Kingdom. Strict European privacy legislation may prevent Threads from coming
Threads is yet to be available in Ireland and the rest of Europe. A spokesperson for the Data Protection Commission (DPC) says she contacted Meta about the new app and that it has yet to be rolled out in Europe. Whether that will happen at a later date, he could not say.
The spokesperson could not say why Threads is not coming to Europe (for the time being). In any case, it is not because the Irish regulator has stopped this. The American tech company would not have prepared a launch outside the United Kingdom, perhaps because of strict privacy legislation.
European privacy rules prohibit a parent company from merging user data with a subsidiary. That’s precisely what Meta tried in 2021 when it dictated new terms of use and privacy for WhatsApp users. The DPC stopped that at the time. Because Threads is tightly integrated with Instagram, Meta may have chosen eggs for its money and postponed a European launch.
Twitter is in a turbulent period.
The introduction of Threads comes at a time when Twitter is in dire straits. Since the takeover of the company by businessman Elon Musk, the number of employees has dropped from 7,500 to 1,300, which has raised concerns among the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the European Commission.
Furthermore, since his acquisition, Musk introduced a paid subscription for subscribers, the company closed its Twitter API for third-party applications, the use of Tweetdeck was restricted, Twitter users can no longer read tweets if they are not logged in, and lowered Twitter limits the maximum number of tweets a person can read each day to prevent ‘data scraping and system manipulation’.