At a conference in Madrid, Natalia Martos, chief law officer at Spanish social network Tuenti, criticized Facebook for avoiding the European privacy regulation. She asked Facebook to be honest in this respect and not hide in Mountain View, while it’s making business with Spanish users.

Spanish lawyer Paloma Llaneza, who was at the same round table, had even a stronger point and accused Facebook of opening a non-operational office in Madrid so that it could avoid local privacy regulation. European privacy laws are quite strict, which means that Euro social networks need to invest more money in order to avoid fines from national data agencies.

Besides, when a user has some type of problem with Facebook, going to court in the US is so expensive that nobody goes all the way. On the contrary, Tuenti is a company registered in Spain, which makes it much easier for any Spanish national to take it to court.

Recently Tuenti had to throw away some users who were not able to show they were older than 14. Converting private profiles into public information, as Facebook did two months ago, would also not be legal according to Spanish regulation. Llaneza even asked Spanish authorities to forbid access to any foreign social network from Spanish territory.