Snapchat chief says EU regulators helping Google, Facebook

The head of Snapchat warned European regulators on Tuesday that their efforts to protect user data were entrenching the positions of internet giants such as Google and Facebook.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel's comments in London came three months after the UK parliament published a scathing report accusing Facebook of acting like "digital gangsters" who brazenly violate privacy rules.

The European Union took the lead last year by implementing a strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) policy making platforms' access to customer data more transparent and easier for users to control.

Spiegel called the European approach well-meaning but potentially self-defeating.

"I think that some of the regulation like GDPR, for example, may end up entrenching very large players," he told a business conference organised by The Wall Street Journal.

"If you're a small publisher today and you want to run ads on your website, it's very very hard to do that because you are not at scale, you don't have a giant ads platform, so you might want to plug into Google, for example, or Facebook," he said.

"And if you do that, you're basically going to have to tell your customers that you are selling your data to Google or Facebook."