Data protection officer Schrems: “Heavy hit for meta”

“This is a major blow to Meta, but also to other online advertising companies.” The Austrian data protection officer and lawyer Max Schrems commented on a judgment of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on Tuesday. It is about the way the US group brings together and uses user data in the EU. And from the point of view of the ECJ, this is not covered by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in key areas.

The starting point for the judgment of the supreme judges was a decision by the German Federal Cartel Office in 2019. The competition authority had forbidden Meta from merging personal information from the services Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with reference to European data protection regulations. Acceptance of the General Terms of Use is not sufficient for this. Customer approval must be obtained separately. Meta had appealed against this to the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court – arguing that the Federal Cartel Authority did not have the powers to decide this.

The German court passed the question on to the ECJ in Luxembourg for a decision. And now supports the German Federal Cartel Office. The ECJ explained that antitrust authorities should also check compliance with data protection regulations in their competition investigations. The German Federal Cartel Office was thus also authorized to prohibit the Facebook group from merging user data.

If users log in to Facebook, they agree to the general terms of use and also the guidelines for the use of data and so-called cookies. Meta collects data about the activities inside and outside the platform and assigns them to the users’ Facebook accounts. The data outside the social network concerns information about the access to third-party websites and data about the use of other platforms that also belong to the meta group, such as WhatsApp and Instagram. The aim of data collection and linking is targeted, personal advertising.

The ECJ found that this data processing could not be justified by the fact that Meta financed itself with personalized advertising. “This makes it clear that Meta cannot simply circumvent the GDPR with a few paragraphs in its documents”, said data protection officer Schrems. The German court must now decide on the specific case.

Competitive app to Twitter

Meta also announced on Tuesday that it would be rolling out a competing app for the short message service Twitter. The app called “threads” should be designed in such a way that it can be linked to other networks of the same type. The application will be available for download in the iPhone and Android app stores in the coming days. (via)