Meta Announces Plans to Obtain User Consent for Targeted Advertising in This Area
On Tuesday, social media giant Meta announced its plan to seek consent from users in the European Union before enabling businesses to target advertising based on their activities on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
According to Meta, the change concerns a number of evolving regulatory requirements in the region, and is the result of an order issued in January by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, Meta’s lead EU regulator, to re-evaluate the legal basis for ad targeting.
Facebook and Instagram users had effectively agreed to allow their data to be used for targeted advertising when they signed up to the services’ terms of service, until the regulator decided it could not process personal data in this way.
“Today we are announcing our intention to change the legal basis we use to process certain data for behavioral advertising of people living in the EU, EEA (European Economic Area) and Switzerland from ‘legitimate interests’ to ‘consent,'” Meta said in a blog post.
“There is no immediate impact on our services in the region. Once this change is made, advertisers will still be able to run personalized advertising campaigns to reach potential customers and grow their business. We have taken this change into account in our business prospects.”
Meta added that it will share more information about how the process works in practice in the coming months, after increasing cooperation with regulators.
A spokesperson for the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, which is the lead data protection authority in the EU for several of the world’s largest technology companies, said that they had received correspondence from Meta about the matter.
