Meta was previously found by EU regulators to have violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and was fined 3.9 million euros (approximately US$4.25 million, NT$132.14 billion) because Meta's personalized advertising content failed to prove that it had accessed user privacy data within a reasonable range.
Meta later statedAn appeal will be filed, but is still evaluating the court's ruling.
Prior to this, Meta required users to agree to terms related to personalized advertising before using services such as Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. The EU believes that Meta's design violates freedom of use, and the requirement to accept the condition of providing personal privacy for advertising also violates the General Data Protection Regulation.
According to the EU's opinion, Meta must prove that users voluntarily agree to provide private data before it can use the privacy provided by users for advertising business. However, it is not easy to prove that users voluntarily provide personal privacy rather than being forced to do so.
From Meta's perspective, if users are allowed to decide for themselves whether to consent to the display of personalized ads using their personal privacy within the service, many people will inevitably choose not to provide their personal privacy, which will reduce the proportion of revenue Meta generates from displaying ads through services such as Facebook.
Prior to this, Apple has added a feature starting from iOS 14 that allows users to customize whether to allow the use of personal privacy to display more targeted advertising content. Google also subsequently added advertising content display settings to the Android operating system, allowing users to decide how ads are presented, which also had a significant impact on Meta's advertising revenue.
