Meta will probably soon be pleading with European Facebook users to let it track their behavior across Instagram and WhatsApp—and across third-party sites that sport Facebook “like” and “share” buttons—so it can show them personalized ads.
That’s thanks to an explosive ruling yesterday in the Court of Justice of the European Union, which is the bloc’s highest court. You can find my in-depth piece on the decision here but the tl;dr:
—Facebook no longer has any legal basis under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for such highly targeted advertising in Europe, apart from getting real consent (i.e., not just agreement to the general terms of use) from each user. That means Europeans will get to use Facebook without having to agree to this sort of pervasive surveillance.
—European competition regulators can identify and (in some cases) crack down on market leaders’ privacy-violating behavior in the context of their antitrust investigations, so it’s no longer just data protection authorities that tech firms have to fear on that front.
This is obviously terrible news for Meta, but much the same will apply to its peers. As Big Tech critic Jason Kint points out, the German antitrust authority, the Bundeskartellamt—whose crackdown on Facebook precipitated yesterday’s CJEU ruling—is also tackling Google over its cross-platform user profiling. And now the Bundeskartellamt’s privacy-plus-antitrust approach has been backed up by the region’s top court.
In related news, I’m fascinated to see how Meta’s new Twitter-rivaling Threads app, which will launch tomorrow, will go down with regulators.
On the one hand, the leading social network company is trying to extend into yet another piece of the market via one of its hugely popular existing platforms, Instagram. That kind of behavior has been seen as a big antitrust violation in the past when perpetrated by market-dominating companies (hey there, Microsoft and Google).
But Threads will use the decentralized ActivityPub protocol, meaning it should offer interoperability with the likes of Mastodon, and portability of its user data and connections to those rival platforms. That may satisfy the interoperability requirements placed on Big Tech “gatekeepers” by the EU’s new Digital Markets Act, which will apply to Meta as of March next year.
At least, it will if Facebook and Instagram are still available in Europe by that point—which may not be the case, thanks to a certain ticking clock. These really are trying times for the company.
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David Meyer
