The EU is looking into Facebook’s proposed buyout of software firm Kustomer, after Ireland and nine other countries expressed competition concerns.
The US-based firm makes ‘chatbot’ software to help companies and customer service agents interact with their consumers.
The merger was registered in Austria and notified to authorities there, but it was not large enough to qualify for an EU assessment.
However, the European Commission has agreed to examine it on foot of requests by Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Romania.
“The Commission considers that the transaction might affect competition in the markets for CRM [customer relationship management] software and online display advertising services,” the EU executive said in a statement yesterday.
“The Commission also concluded that it is best placed to examine the potential cross-border effects of the transaction.”
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties wrote to EU data protection and competition authorities in February asking them to “assess the data processing consequences” of the merger.
The ICCL has also asked both companies whether data acquired by Kustomer will be processed by Facebook or any of its other companies, suchas Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram.
The takeover was first announced in November 2020. Although the value of the transaction was never disclosed, it was widely reported to be worth $1bn (€825m).
Kustomer CEO and co-founder Brad Birnbaum said at the time that he was looking forward to “enhancing the messaging experience” as part of the “Facebook family”.
Facebook said in a statement last November that it planned “to support Kustomer’s operations by providing the resources it needs to scale its business”.
It also said that Kustomer businesses would continue to own the data they acquired from interactions with their customers, but that it would eventually be hosted on secure Facebook servers.
Facebook also said at the time that it would not automatically use Kustomer data to tailor advertising but that Kustomer’s businesses would “have the option” to use their data for their own marketing.