⁍ Belgium’s privacy watchdog sparred with Facebook in a case that could escalate its privacy fights across EU.

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⁍ The case has unleash potential investigations by national agencies in the bloc into other U.S. Alphabet’s Google, Twitter and Apple.

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⁍ Under EU privacy rules, the Irish privacy authority is the lead authority for Facebook as the company’s European head office is based in Ireland.

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– The fight over Facebook’s data privacy practices is headed to Europe’s highest court. The case before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) comes after a Belgian court sought guidance on Facebook’s challenge against the territorial competence of the Belgian regulator’s bid to stop the company from tracking users in Belgium through cookies stored in Facebook’s social plug-ins, regardless of whether they have an account or not, reports Reuters. Under landmark EU privacy rules known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its one-stop-shop mechanism, the Irish privacy authority is the lead authority for Facebook as the company’s European head office is based in Ireland. Google, Twitter, and Apple also have their European headquarters in Ireland. GDPR, however, allows some leeway for other national privacy regulators to rule on violations limited to a specific country, which France and Germany have done. Facebook’s lawyer Dirk Van Liedekerke argued for the merits of the one-stop-shop mechanism. “This would prevent any judicial fragmentation. GDPR is intended to put an end to where data controllers would have to deal with any number of supervisory authorities,” he said. “We cannot allow rules of competences to be sidestepped by national authorities in national courts. The risk would be huge, risk of cases before the courts.” The Irish watchdog has opened cases into Facebook, Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp as well as Twitter, Apple, Verizon Media, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, and US digital advertiser Quantcast.