Court Upholds French Social Data Mining Tax Law

France’s high court mostly approved a controversial new law that allows tax authorities to use social media data to catch tax cheats.

The Constitutional Council said Dec. 27 that the law balanced the right to privacy and freedom of expression with efforts to fight tax fraud, but it stopped its reach in some areas.

The measure, included in the country’s 2020 budget act, would give tax and customs authorities a three-year trial period to use artificial intelligence to sift through taxpayers’ public postings on social media sites. Tax authorities want to use that data to find evidence of tax fraud, ...