The Court of Justice of the European Union has established That Meta Platforms must limit the use of personal data collected by Facebook to targeted advertising onlyeven when users consent to the use of their information for advertising purposes, a decision that could have significant consequences for companies that base their profits on advertising in the region.
“An online social network such as Facebook cannot use all personal data collected for the purposes of targeted advertising, without time limits and without distinguishing the type of data“, ha stated the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in a ruling on Friday.
In other words, social networks like Facebook cannot continue to use users’ personal data for advertising targeting indefinitely; the Court of the European Union added that limits must be imposed to comply with the data minimization requirements established by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
It’s worth noting that Article 5(1)(c) of the GDPR requires companies to limit data processing to that which is strictly necessarypreventing personal data collected about a person (either on the platform or via external third parties) from being aggregated, analyzed and processed for targeted advertising without time limits.
The case that pushed the Court of Justice of the European Union towards this decision
The case was initially filed by privacy activist and noyb (None Of Your Business) co-founder Maximilian “Max” Schrems in 2014, following complaints that the social media giant had targeted him with personalized ads based on your sexual orientation.
“The fact that a person has made a declaration about his or her sexual orientation during a public discussion does not authorize the operator of a social networking platform to process other data relating to that orientation, possibly obtained outside that platform using websites and third-party partner apps, for the purpose of aggregating and analyzing such data to offer that person personalized advertising“, declared the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Noyb, in a statement, welcomed the ruling, saying the result was in line with expectations and stressed that the judgment also extends to any other online advertising company that does not adopt rigorous data deletion practices.
“Meta and many other companies in the online advertising industry they simply ignored this rule and did not provide erasure periods or limitations based on the type of personal data“, ha stated the Austrian non-profit organization.
They then declared to Noyb: “The application of the ‘data minimization principle’ radically limits the use of personal data for advertising. The data minimization principle applies regardless of the legal basis used for processing, therefore even a user who consents to personalized advertising cannot have their personal data used indefinitely.“
META’s statements and situations from other social media
In a statement shared with Reuters, Meta said stated that it has made economic efforts to “integrate privacy” into its products, underlining that “does not use special categories of data provided by users to personalize ads, while advertisers are not allowed to share sensitive data.”
This development comes as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against ByteDance-owned TikTok. for alleged violations of U.S. state child privacy laws, also called the Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act.
The lawsuit accuses TikTok of failing to provide adequate tools to allow parents and guardians to control privacy and account settings for minors between the ages of 13 and 17.
“For example, parents or guardians do not have the ability to control the sharing, disclosure and sale of the personally identifiable information of a known minor, nor to control TikTok’s ability to display advertising targeted to a known minor“, the lawsuit reads.
“Texas law requires social media companies to take steps to protect children online and requires them to provide parents with tools to do the same,” Paxton said. “TikTok and other social media companies cannot ignore their obligations under Texas law.”
TikTok, which bans targeted advertising for anyone under 18, said it disagrees with the allegations and offers “robust safety measures for teens and parents, including ‘family pairing’, all publicly available.”
So what do you think of the decision of the Court of the European Union and the situation of other social networks like TikTok? Write it in the comments.
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