Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has said it will ask a court in Norway to block a fine that the country’s data regulator has brought against Meta for violating privacy. of the user.
The introduction of this fine could have wider effects in Europe
As of August 14, Meta Platforms was fined 1 million krone ($94,313) per day for collecting user data and sending ads to these users. This model is called behavioral advertising, a popular business model among tech giants.
Meta Platforms is seeking a temporary ban on the order of the daily fine until 3.11.
Meta said on August 1, it intends to obtain permission from users in the European Union and the European Economic Area (EEA), the European single market, before running behavioral ads. In a statement emailed to Reuters, Meta said it announced its intention to move to consensus-based legal action in the EU and EEA over personalized advertising.
Norwegian regulator Datatilsynet will defend the imposition of the fine in court. “It is unclear when and how Meta sought consent from users while users’ rights were violated,” the agency said. Tobias Judin, the agency’s international director, said Datatilsynet would argue that there is no basis for a restraining order to enforce the fine, according to Reuters.
Datatilsynet can impose a permanent penalty by referring its decision to the competent authority, the European General Data Protection Commission, if it agrees with the Norwegian regulator’s decision. That could extend the decision’s territorial reach to the rest of Europe. However, Datatilsynet has yet to make this move.
The upcoming hearing at the court in Oslo (Norway) will last two days.
In another development, Meta is preparing to soon launch a web version of Threads in a race against billionaire Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) platform. Threads is a social network that specializes in sharing short text content.
Threads, launched as an Android and iOS app on July 5 and reached 100 million users in just five days. However, the upward momentum faltered and even turned downward as users returned to the X platform, which was more familiar to them after the initial rush to try out Meta’s new product. In just over a month, the number of daily active users on Threads’ Android app has dropped to 10.3 million from a peak of 49.3 million, as reported by analytics platform Similarweb on August 10.