By modupe Atoyeje
The European Commission (EC) recently charged Meta with breaching the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) via its new “pay or consent” advertising model.
Meta’s charges was announced on the 1st of July 2024, following the tech giant’s launch of the no-ads subscription service for Facebook and Instagram in Europe last November. The move is the European Union executive’s latest against Big Tech since the DMA came into force earlier this year.
Meta who has claimed that her apps offers users a choice between being targeted by ads based on their personal data or paying to avoid them. The system was rolled out after the EU ruled that Meta must get consent before showing ads to users – a decision that threatened its business model of tailoring ads based on individual users’ online interests and digital activity.
However, the EC said that this binary choice does not give users the option to “freely consent” to the combination of their personal data from various Meta-operated sites.
It also found in a preliminary investigation that Meta fails to provide them a less personalised but equivalent version of the social networks.
“We want to empower citizens to be able to take control over their own data and choose a less personalised ads experience,” EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.
Meta violations could result in a fine as much as 10 percent of a company’s global annual turnover.