Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Meta Offers EU Users Ad Consent Choice Amid Rising Privacy Scrutiny

Tech giant Meta is under a lot of legal pressure from the EU after it rolled out a clause that spoke about ad tracking choices. The company gave users the chance to pay or consent to ad tracking.

For now, it’s currently offering regional users of various social networks such as Facebook and Instagram the chance to change how its ad business works. There is little wonder why failure of compliance in this regard could lead to fines going up to 10% of the worldwide yearly turnover.

The company’s latest attempt to comply with EU laws involves offering less personalized ads. During the year’s start, we saw the EU regulations get stricter. Meta spoke about a new subscription fee to avoid ads and being tracked. Meanwhile, those who did not pay would be shown ads that targeted them. For now, the company is making the most of cross-service profiling.

Meta is now not so creepy about the matter but that will only be determined after seeing the final decision ruled out by the DMA probe. Now the question is what does the term less personalized ads mean.

It has to do with targeting users which includes age, gender, location, and engagement. Now if that will be enough to make regulators in the region happy or not, time will tell. For now, the tech giant faces massive privacy challenges for ad tracking.

The core issue that it’s facing has to do with getting users’ consent for sharing their personal information. Both its apps Instagram and Facebook require consent for professional service tracking and micro-targeting.
Meta has yet to ask anyone for permission for this kind of activity. All it did was put out a binary choice of accepting to consent or paying a fee which left people very little room for choice.

We must mention that the investigation first kicked in March and then in July. It revealed some preliminary findings about the model which doesn’t comply with rules. As pressure increases on the tech giant, Meta is trying to reconfigure the ad business in a manner that meets regulators’ needs.

It also refused to accept that personalized ads were invasive and instead explained how they were the best option for both users and their businesses.

Image: DIW-AIgen

Read next: Google is Going to Delete Inactive Gmail and Photos Accounts which will Include all Your Data
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

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