On 7 February 2019, the German antitrust authority (Bundeskartellamt, the FCO) ruled against Facebook combining user personal data from different sources, saying it was exploiting its position as a dominant social media company in violation of the
On May 10, 2016, the French and German antitrust authorities published a joint study on competition law and the collection and use of data, particularly so-called big data (the Big Data Study). Data protection as such is outside the scope of EU competition laws, but antitrust authorities have considered the significance of data on a number of occasions, often in the context of merger reviews such as the EU Commission’s Facebook/WhatsApp case.