Meta will probably soon be pleading with European Facebook users to let it track their behavior across Instagram and WhatsApp—and across third-party sites that sport Facebook “like” and “share” buttons—so it can show them personalized ads.
That’s thanks to an explosive ruling yesterday in the Court of Justice of the European Union, which is the bloc’s highest court. You can find my in-depth piece on the decision here but the tl;dr:
—Facebook no longer has any legal basis under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for such highly targeted advertising in Europe, apart from getting real consent (i.e., not just agreement to the general terms of use) from each user. That means Europeans will get to use Facebook without having to agree to this sort of pervasive surveillance.
—European competition regulators can identify and (in some cases) crack down on market leaders’ privacy-violating behavior in the context of their antitrust investigations, so it’s no longer just data protection authorities that tech firms have to fear on that front.
This is obviously terrible news for Meta, but much the same will apply to its peers. As Big Tech critic Jason Kint points out, the German antitrust authority, the Bundeskartellamt—whose crackdown on Facebook precipitated yesterday’s CJEU ruling—is also tackling Google over its cross-platform user profiling. And now the Bundeskartellamt’s privacy-plus-antitrust approach has been backed up by the region’s top court.
In related news, I’m fascinated to see how Meta’s new Twitter-rivaling Threads app, which will launch tomorrow, will go down with regulators.
On the one hand, the leading social network company is trying to extend into yet another piece of the market via one of its hugely popular existing platforms, Instagram. That kind of behavior has been seen as a big antitrust violation in the past when perpetrated by market-dominating companies (hey there, Microsoft and Google).
But Threads will use the decentralized ActivityPub protocol, meaning it should offer interoperability with the likes of Mastodon, and portability of its user data and connections to those rival platforms. That may satisfy the interoperability requirements placed on Big Tech “gatekeepers” by the EU’s new Digital Markets Act, which will apply to Meta as of March next year.
At least, it will if Facebook and Instagram are still available in Europe by that point—which may not be the case, thanks to a certain ticking clock. These really are trying times for the company.
More news below.
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David Meyer
NEWSWORTHY
TikTok faces major pressure in France. The government says days of intense rioting and looting were fueled by videos of the violence being shared online. Per Bloomberg’s reporting, here’s President Emmanuel Macron on TikTok and Snapchat: “Among the youngest ones, it leads to a sort of departure from reality, and we have the impression sometimes that some of them are living out the video games that have brainwashed them in the street.” Ministers met with TikTok, Meta, Twitter, and Snap representatives on Friday, asking for their help in removing violent content and identifying instigators.
More hassles for Mark Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO has been lambasted by Chinese state media over his past criticisms of the country (in particular, his references to censorship on TikTok and intellectual property theft). According to South China Morning Post’s coverage, a Beijing Daily opinion piece compared Zuckerberg unfavorably with more amenable Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook and suggested Meta could find itself unable to sell VR headsets in China.
China targets semiconductor metals. The country will limit exports of gallium and germanium, metals widely used in semiconductors, sensors, and other gadgetry. The export controls will come into force on Aug. 1, and Reuters reports that Chinese state-backed think-tanker Wei Jianguo said they are “just a start.” Wei, a former vice commerce minister, described the controls as countermeasures against tech restrictions targeting China’s chip sector.
ON OUR FEED
“Twitter now makes me feel as if subscribing to the service (which, as I’ve outlined, has been valuable to me from time to time) would be rewarding bad leadership and overall bad behavior.”
—Lawyer and author Mike Godwin (of Godwin’s law fame) distills the key problem with Twitter making TweetDeck a subscribers-only feature without actually improving it.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino finally speaks four days into the platform’s meltdown: ‘You need to make big moves,’ by Chloe Taylor
Elon Musk sends fired Twitter employees to arbitration, then he just doesn’t show up, new lawsuit claims, by Bloomberg
Biden administration can’t contact social media giants to suppress posts except in rare cases, judge rules, by Associated Press
Top LinkedIn exec is bullish on A.I.’s role in turbocharging self-promotion on job platforms—but warns there’s work to be done on catching frauds, by Massimo Marioni
EU’s new A.I. regulation looks past ‘existential risks’ to focus on tech’s role in everyday life, MEP says, by Peter Vanham and Nicholas Gordon
‘Don’t use A.I. detectors for anything important,’ says the author of the definitive ‘AI Weirdness’ blog. Her own book failed the test, by Stephen Pastis
BEFORE YOU GO
Toyota’s battery breakthrough. Today’s electric vehicles use lithium-ion batteries that are relatively easy and therefore cheap to make, but they come with a fire risk. Now it looks like solid-state battery technology, which has so far proved too costly but which promises shorter charging times, could finally hit the market.
Toyota said yesterday that it had made massive advances with solid-state technology, which it was already planning to deploy in its cars a couple of years from now. The Japanese car giant said it could halve the size, weight, and cost of such batteries, using simplified manufacturing processes. It claims it could make an EV battery that lasts 745 miles and takes all of 10 minutes to charge, the Guardian reports.
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