The article is quite clear on what the issue is. Meta needs explicit consent to do this kind of targeting. With consent, there is no issue. The tracking itself is not illegal, but doing it without consent is illegal.
They are basically being forced to separate the part of their business that actually makes money from the part that users like and then forced to lose money on those users.
I would be fine about laws requiring facebook to be up front and clear about how they are using this data, but mandating free rider status seems a step too far.
While I don't think it will work on the scale FAANG wants (see e.g. Youtube premium), what is the legal roadblock to let users chose between tracking or paying for the service?
In Germany too, if I remember correctly.
But if you are so sure about this, please sue so we can get rid of these cookie walls!
It also requires a court to decide that your fee is a “reasonable” one and you cannot just refuse access outright - you must make your content available to the non-consenting user.
Regardless, all of this will be illegal anyways once the DMA comes into effect. And I still think, national exceptions aside, that my description of the current state of EU law was accurate:
"The prevalent regulatory approach in Europe is that currently advocated by the European Data Protection Board ('EDPB') in its Guidelines 05/2020 on Consent under Regulation 2016/679 whereby the EDPB provides in no uncertain terms that '[i]n order for consent to be freely given, access to services and functionalities must not be made conditional on the consent of a user to the storing of information, or gaining of access to information (paragraph 39 of the Guidelines)'." [0]
[0]: https://www.dataguidance.com/opinion/france-cnil-opens-door-....
The regulation is very clear: non-functionally-essential data processing requires explicit consent. If in doubt, err on the side of caution and use consent and opt-in rather than another legal basis such as legitimate interest. Business models based on stalking or spamming are no longer allowed.
Keep in mind that the objective of the regulation is not some punitive shake-down but to give people rights on how their data is used. A good-faith effort that accidentally falls short will be given guidance and a reasonable timeline to implement changes - there's no risk to ever get a fine as long as you err on the side of caution. You can also proactively ask your local regulator for guidance if something is unclear.
As I have said, this model attempts to enshrine free ridership, which might work while there is the rest of the world subsidizes it, but it is not a sustainable model to force tech companies to serve users at a loss.
The objective of the DMA which will serve to enshrine the illegality of these models is to target American tech companies and European legislators have explicitly stated as such.
No it doesn't - you can still charge for a service.
It just makes stalking/spamming an unviable method of payment.
Free access to global communication is not a bad thing.
But this is besides the point: the guidance is absolutely not clear and if local regulators cannot even get their story straight I am not sure how you expect foreign companies to figure it out. And collecting information about how users use your property is not stalking.
Advertisers aren't charities and the purpose of advertising is ultimately to drive profit. Subsidizing poor people is not in their interest.
The fact that poor people can currently access things for free is a result of imprecise targeting. If there was a way for advertisers to reliably tell apart poor people from the rich ones they'll happily block the poor ones.
Without laws like the GDPR in place to curtail data collection and profiling, it's only a matter of time before more and more data is collected to enable this kind of targeting and lock out poor people too.
> Free access to global communication is not a bad thing.
Global communication being subsidized (and thus controlled) by a handful of commercial interests is very dangerous.
> And collecting information about how users use your property is not stalking.
I'm not talking about basic self-hosted (very important difference!) web analytics or server logs here, I'm talking about large-scale stalking such as what Google/Facebook or any major ad provider does. The information they collect go way beyond what the user does on their platforms.
You are absolutely wrong about that and you do not understand the business model. I am not saying it has anything to do with the goodness of their heart but this is absolutely not something that would be in their interest. They benefit from the networks effects just like the users do.
> Advertisers aren't charities and the purpose of advertising is ultimately to drive profit. Subsidizing poor people is not in their interest.
It is possible for self-interested action to have knockoff positive effects. In fact, it is actually quite common: most exchanges are mutually beneficial.
> I'm not talking about basic self-hosted (very important difference!) web analytics or server logs here, I'm talking about large-scale stalking such as what Google/Facebook or any major ad provider does. The information they collect go way beyond what the user does on their platforms.
If you read my original comment, you would see that I am in favor of banning cross-site stalking but that is both not what Meta is being fined for here and not the only thing the GDPR/DMA prohibits.
Targeting based on only your own platform is a good middle ground.
I think it's still a problem because it's a grey area as to what "own platform" means exactly. Malicious actors will stretch that definition beyond what's reasonable.
Publicly-available data posted by the user seems fair, but things like scroll position, or the time you read a particular item, or forms typed but not submitted (all things I'm sure Facebook is absolutely collecting via client-side JS) should not be considered fair.
Either way, I'm personally in favour of ad-based business models getting shut down/being made unprofitable as it will ultimately realign the incentives, surface the true price of platforms and mean that we can finally have communication/entertainment tools that are designed with those primary purposes in mind as opposed to spam machines with the bare minimum amount of functionality sprinkled in. I want our online public squares to be accountable to their end-users rather than advertisers, and facilitate communication rather than outrage (what they call "engagement").
Not illegal then.
> The difference between targeting and not is the different between net profit or not for many users
I don't think it's a bad idea to have regulation that makes entire regions of an industry unprofitable over night, if that's what it takes.
Citation very very much needed as that is not at all what standard economic theory would predict.
As I said, there are lots of niche small businesses that literally could not survive without targeted advertising so that demand goes away as soon as these bans go into effect.
> I don't think it's a bad idea to have regulation that makes entire regions of an industry unprofitable over night, if that's what it takes.
Yes but I think if the choice were actually presented as “pay for FB or repeal this regulation” and the EU had a referenda on it, the regulation would be banned. The only way this is getting through is because the public is being convinced that they can have their cake and eat it too. They might be right, but only because they are being subsidized by users in the rest of the world.
That was assuming that the total ad spend is constant as a fraction of revenue and that revenue would be unchanged. If less effective ads overall would lead to lower revenues then the ad spends would shrink. But they would shrink equally for everyone, at least.
> there are lots of niche small businesses that literally could not survive without targeted advertising
There is nothing banning targeting. The problem is using info that users don't know/think is used for targeting, and using it for targeting. I'd be happy to take a 200 question survey as a condition for using facebook, where they ask me about my hobbies and whereabouts and clearly say it's for ad targeting. Obviously I could say "I'd rather not tell" instead of "I like guitars", but in such a scenario I'd happily give up my targeting info. But I don't want to be shown a guitar ad because I looked at one on an unrelated site with a facebook tracking pixel on it. It's absolutely dystopian.
> public is being convinced that they can have their cake and eat it too.
Yes I'm sure many think that. But I think the only way of changing the status quo is through heavy handed regulation and making initially impopular decisions and risking the death of a lot of business in the process.
Facebook are the ones who've structured their business like this though — they could profitable with a subscription model instead, they've just chosen to make their product free at the point of use.
There was a recent decision in France suggesting otherwise, but this is not the opinion of the primary EU regulatory guidance nor has it been seriously tested. Either way, it will become fully illegal to refuse under the DMA.
[0]: https://www.dataguidance.com/opinion/france-cnil-opens-door-....
A service provider must provide its offerings regardless of the user accepting to be tracked or not. The provider is not even allowed to make it cumbersome to opt out.
If Meta doesn't like it they're free to either be fined into oblivion or, alternatively, to just fuck off from the European market.
The law in question is quite unambiguous.
I mean, obviously they are compelled to do that and this is completely fine.
As users people should not be blackmailed into accepting psychological manipulation in their lives, just to be allowed to use a service. If Facebook's model for profit is so bad, that they cannot profit without manipulation, then perhaps their whole business is a shady one and they should start asking for membership fees. I could not care less, whether they need their pesky ads or the data from people viewing and interacting with them. Without consent they don't belong on the users' screens, end of story. If they cannot do business ethically, I wish they would not do business at all.
> I would be fine about laws requiring facebook to be up front and clear about how they are using this data, but mandating free rider status seems a step too far.
It has nothing to do with "free riding". They offer a service and that service should be worth its weight to the users. If it isn't, then apparently it is not a good enough service. To get back the money through the back door, by utilizing manipulation of users and spreading hate-speech for engagement metrics is not OK.
And when they do, I always click "reject all". I think most people would - which is why I guess some sites still try to use those dark patterns. I'm still waiting for a big regulatory fine to make an example. If a known company is fined almost out of existence due to lack of a reject button, I think there would be instant self-regulation here.
> For me anyway GDPR has been largely a waste of bureaucracy, a better effort would be to educate populous about what cookies are and how tracking works and the extent of the trackings etc - these stuff should be in High School curriculum already by now.
Don't confuse the GDPR with "cookie banners" though. That's the end user visible tip of the iceberg. The biggest premise (and in my opinion the genius of the regulation) is that the end user is not required to know or understand anything. Instead, the people handling their data should. And if nothing else, it really has forced everyone (often even outside the EU) to think twice about how their data is stored and retained. And that's huge positive even if cookies were never a thing in gdpr.
Didn’t the EU recently cut a deal where the data from EU can be transferred to US without any legal ramifications [1]? So then this just goes to show it’s just about adding another layer of bureaucracy instead of caring about protecting user data.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-signs-off-on-data-transfe...