According to a person familiar with the matter, the EU privacy watchdog ruled that Meta can not run advertising based on personal data and will need users consent to do so in early December 2022. The social giant, which lost 70 percent of its market value due to a bad bet on the metaverse, has been dropped by the hammer.
Facebook's parent company, Meta, was fined over $400 million after it found that its Facebook and Instagram services breached the EU privacy rules. Zuckerberg's company was slapped with a pair of fines totaling more than $400 million on Wednesday after the Irish privacy regulators concluded that Meta's advertising and data handling practices were in violation of EU privacy laws.
Announcing the end of the long-year investigations into the company's privacy practices, the Irish Data Protection Commission said in a statement Wednesday:
The Irish privacy regulator said Meta should pay two fines - one, a 210 million euro $222.5 million fine for breaches of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, and the second, a 180 million euro fine for breaches of the same law by Instagram.
The fines are the end of two lengthy investigations into Meta by the Irish regulator. Two years ago on May 25, 2018, DPC s investigations into Meta began two years ago, the day the EU's GDPR came into effect. DPC, which is the lead regulatory authority for Meta and several other U.S. tech giants, has been criticized for delays in the process. The DPC gave Meta three months to bring its data processing operations into compliance, or else face additional fines.
It came a year after Apple rolled out a privacy feature that prevents Facebook from tracking you without your consent. Advertising is a big part of Meta's revenue. Last year, Meta said that automatically opting users out of its app tracking could cost the company 3% of its annual advertising revenue.
This is not the first time Meta has had problems with privacy regulators around the world. In August, Mata agreed to pay $37.5 million for violating the privacy of users and tracking their movements through their phones without their permission. Meta agreed to pay $37.5 million for the lawsuit that began about four years ago as part of the settlement reached in San Francisco federal court. Meta denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle the case.
In April of last year, Meta revealed 500,000 fewer daily log-ins and declining profits. Zuckerberg said that Facebook users' decline was due to the boom in popularity of the competitor platform, TikTok. Meta blamed the woes on a combination of other factors, including privacy changes to Apple's iOS and economic challenges, for Wednesday s decline in stock prices.
The new App Tracking Transparency requires all apps to get permission before tracking their data on apps or websites owned by other companies for advertising, sharing their data with data brokers, according to the new App Tracking Transparency. Apple said that apps can prompt users for permission, and in Settings users will be able to see which apps have requested permission to track, so they can make changes to their choice at any time.