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    • Europe’s DMA forces Meta to ‘less personalized ads’
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    Europe’s DMA forces Meta to ‘less personalized ads’

    Online Niel Posted on

    Meta, sub legal pressure in the European Union based on a binary “pay us or consent to ad tracking” option that it currently offers to regional users of its social networks Facebook and Instagram, is once again changing the way its regional ad business works. It’s no wonder that non-compliance in this context risks fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover.

    The adtech giant’s latest attempt to automatically bring its surveillance ads outside EU laws is a bid to show what it sees as “less personalized ads”. The European regulatory framework tightened earlier this year with the emergence of the flagship regulation on block market contestability (Digital Markets Actor DMA).

    One blog post announcing a change in “weeks” to how it targets ads to users in the EU, which was first reported by WSJMeta said users in the region who opt out of paying a subscription fee was launched just over a year ago (for ad-free versions of its social media services) will soon display ads that use less personal data for “contextual” targeting than is currently the case. Meta currently uses cross-service (and cross-site) tracking and profiling (also known as surveillance).

    In other words, Meta is finally being forced to stop being so scary about EU ads. Although the tech giant may be forced to move on, still in the future, when regulators reach a final decision on the DMA probe.

    The data points that Meta claims it will use to target the “less personalized” ads that regional users receive are slated to include “a person’s age, location, gender, and how a person interacts with ads.”

    Whether this will be enough to satisfy EU regulators remains to be seen. The block is expected to complete its DMA survey next year. But it’s worth noting that Meta is also facing ongoing privacy challenges to its ad tracking model under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as consumer protection complaints.

    DMA’s main legal issue for Meta is that the law requires it, as the designated gatekeeper, to obtain users’ consent to the combination of their personal data between designated core platform services (CPS) and other services. (GDPR consent standards also apply here.)

    Both Facebook and Instagram are CPS — meaning that since early March, when it came into compliance with the DMA, Meta has needed permission to track and profile the activity of users of the services in order to micro-target them with advertisements in the EU.

    The point is, Meta didn’t ask people for permission for this pervasive tracking and profiling — it was just given a binary choice to accept the surveillance or pay a subscription fee for ad-free versions of the services.

    Online Niel
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