Meta keeps stumbling over the same stone. Its eagerness and stubbornness in collecting data from its users in an unusual way to sell it without their consent to other companies so that they can use it for advertising or other purposes has already caused it displeasure and fines imposed by the governments of several European countries.
This year, Meta already had to face a fine of 390 million euros imposed by Ireland. In May of the same year, a second one of 1.2 billion euros also arrived from Ireland. Last August, Meta received a new fine in Norway for almost $100,000 a day for using personal data from Facebook and Instagram profiles for targeted advertising. And this is just the beginning, but Meta does not budge on its privacy policy and does not respect what Europe wants to impose on it.
Since 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union establishes the prohibition of users of internet services from being tracked in their digital activity for advertising purposes without their consent. Europe is intransigent in complying with the rule, forcing the platforms to respect them, but Meta has a hard time understanding it and does not want to respect them.
The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg was sued last Friday by the 83 Spanish media outlets that make up the Information Media Association (AMI), for unfair competition and demanded compensation of 550 million euros for its “continued systematic and massive breach of European data protection regulations” between May 2018 and July 2023. This is the first large joint lawsuit in the Spanish press sector against a platform.
The Spanish media estimate, based on different resolutions of the European data protection authorities, that “Meta has repeatedly failed to comply with the Community data protection legislation, ignoring the regulatory requirement that citizens must consent to the use of their data to advertising profiling”. These decisions by regulators have been a constant since the application of the GDPR, which Meta has tried to circumvent so far with little success.
At the beginning of last November, the European Data Protection Board (JEPD) ordered the data protection regulator of Ireland — where Meta has its European headquarters — to prohibit on its platforms “all processing of personal data for the purposes of advertising based on behavior”. This was a general order for all countries in the European Economic Area that generalized a ban established months ago by Norway’s data protection regulator.
The publishers state in their lawsuit that “Meta’s behavior determines that one hundred percent of the technology giant’s income derived from the sale of segmented advertising has been obtained illegitimately.”
For this reason, they denounce that the Californian company makes “systematic and massive use of users’ personal data” on its platforms, so that they are “tracked without their consent throughout their digital browsing.” These practices, according to the plaintiffs, “would have allowed the American company to offer the sale of advertising space on the market based on an illegitimately obtained competitive advantage.”
But since it seems that Zuckerberg is still not satisfied with the degree of engagement that his platforms have achieved so far, Meta now plans to launch Threads in Europe in December, as The Wall Street Journal announced on Thursday. This launch, if it occurs, would be the largest market expansion of the Meta network, which aims to compete with X (Twitter) since it was launched last July.
Up to this point, Threads was available in most markets around the world, but Meta did not attempt to launch it in the European Union due to a lack of guarantees that it could pass the General Data Protection Regulation filter. To try to comply with these regulations, Meta is considering offering European users the possibility of using Threads solely for consumption, without being able to publish anything, but that is not enough, as it does not prevent users’ browsing data from being collected. and used.
At the time of launch, this new network was directly linked to Instagram, something that contravenes European regulations. Meta’s move with Threads comes at a time when X is in serious trouble due to the massive withdrawal of large advertisers, a market that Meta wants to absorb.
In short, Europe is not giving in, and neither is Meta, at least until now. But the European authorities are working to protect the privacy of European citizens, whether Meta wants it or not, so the sanctions will continue, both in the size of the fines and in the frequency with which they are imposed. Reason will end up prevailing, even if it is at hit of fines.
El artículo se puede leer en español en este enlace.
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