The trial of the Spanish newspapers against Meta for unfair competition It will be held at the beginning of October after the oral hearing held in the Commercial Court number 15 of Madrid and which ended with a reflection by the magistrate Teodoro Ladrón Roda: «We dedicate many hours of the day to social networks and the amount of information “The information we have on user data is enormous and must be used rigorously.”
A few words that have served the judge to remember one of the principles of the General Data Protection Regulation (RGPD): the minimization principle. “I’m not saying it, the General Data Protection Regulation and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) say it in several rulings and we must abide by that,” said Ladrón Roda before summoning the parties for October. of 2025 in the absence of an agreement.
In this case, the Spanish newspapers, grouped under the Information Media Association (AMI), sue Meta, – the former Facebook, also owner of Instagram and WhatsApp – for unfair competition for the sale of hyper-personalized digital advertising through the use of personal data collected without consent, violating, according to the plaintiffs, the GDPR between May 2018 and July 2023. They claim 550 million euros.
In the letter, the Spanish media maintain that Mark Zuckerberg’s company has “systematically” failed to comply with the Community General Data Protection Regulation, in force since 2018. After the publication of this regulation, all companies are obliged to obtain express consent of its clients to process their data for advertising purposes in a segmented manner and, thus, launch personalized advertisements. «In November 2023, the company itself recognizes that did not ask for consent», stated Nicolás González-Cuéllar, professor of Procedural Law and legal representative of the AMI.
In his speech at the previous hearing, which was attended by directors of the technology giant, Meta’s lawyer, Javier de Carvajal Cebrián, defended that accepting cookie tracking in its applications does not imply accepting the privacy policy to receive personalized advertising. I argue that the magistrate has ruled that cookie policies are relevant in this case, citing several rulings from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). “Through social networks it is possible to know the ideology, religion, sexual orientation and political opinions of their users,” recalled Ladrón Roda.
The open dispute between the AMI and Meta will be resolved in the trial set for October 1, in which they will be called to testify three directors of the subsidiary that the old Facebook has in Spain.
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