The European Union is cracking down on Facebook and Instagram’s most annoying feature

Essentially, Meta has been blocked from showing ads based on profiles in the EU. The decision prohibits “the processing of personal data for the purpose of behavioral advertising” throughout the European Economic Area (EEA), the board’s announcement said, MTI reports.

The decision requires the Irish Data Protection Regulatory Authority, which has jurisdiction over Meta’s European operations, to take final action on the matter within two weeks, with the ban taking effect one week later. According to the binding decision, heavy fines await large companies if they do not comply with their obligations.

A Meta representative said there would be no material impact because the company has already announced that it will give people in the European Union and European Economic Area the option to sign up and offer a subscription model starting this month to meet regulatory requirements. According to the company, EDPB members have been aware of the company’s plan for weeks and have fully cooperated with them.

He added: “This development is an unjustified disregard for our rigorous and robust regulatory process.”

The EDPB made this decision at the request of the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, the latter of which banned sending targeted ads to Facebook and Instagram users based on their personal data in June.

Last May, Meta was fined a record €1.2 billion by the European Union after the social platform violated EU data protection rules and continued to transfer European citizens’ personal data to the United States following an earlier EU court ruling.

Not so long ago, the European Union made it tougher for platform providers: the Digital Services Act (DSA) may soon become a global standard and oblige companies to make the system of recommendation algorithms transparent. Based on the DSA, actors such as Google, Facebook or Twitter, renamed X, must adhere to several new obligations, from content moderation to filtering fake news and harmful content.

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