Norway has succeeded in getting the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) to make permanent and extend across Europe its ban on Meta (Facebook’s parent company) harvesting user data for targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram.
I will only believe it when I see it. It has been a few years since the EU is threatening a ban and meta threatening to leave the EU, so far none has committed any action.
Cool
Watch them cry foul, threaten to pull out, start a legal fight, then go nowhere like the abusive type they are.
I wish they would pull out. It’s fucking ridiculous that so much of Europe is apparently just ok with using a Meta product for the defacto texting platform (WhatsApp).
Better than the US, at least in Europe you are not forced to buy a specific device just to be able to communicate.
Who knows, if Facebook gets severely limited by these laws, maybe we’ll all switch to Signal or something.
You’re not forced to buy a specific device there. They all text each other fine. You just don’t get fancy iMessage features if you’re on Android.
Eh, it’s not like we started using it because it was Meta’s. They bought it when it was already popular, and switching everyone to something else is difficult.
Yeah, WhatsApp was ported to basically every single platform that was relevant in 2009-2010 when it launched: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Series 40 and Windows Phone. Supporting Blackberry and Nokia mobile OS which were huge at the time as well as the new smartphone OS’s was genius.
I mean that’s basically the same difference. It’s owned by the same company.
Watch them cry foul, threaten to pull out
Ofc. But childish maneuvers are generally less effective in Europe where authorities are still authorities and not just the revenge actors with the bigger guns.
a targeted advertising ban would kill just about every social media platform
They could just run contextual ads for much less effort and privacy violations, and still get the same or better result.
It’s how advertising worked for literally the entire history of advertising before the modern internet. You put ads for car stuff on the cars website. You don’t need to build an entire dossier on me. If I’m looking at the star wars wiki, you can be pretty confident that I’m interested in sci-fi and fantasy. You don’t need to spend billions of dollars tracking me to know that.
This is not an expert opinion so I could be wrong, but I think it would be a better system. Simpler to implement, less stalking, less “oops we didn’t show any house ads to black people” potential.
