Facebook ran ads in Moldova for oligarch sanctioned by US
By DAVID KLEPPER and STEPHEN McGRATH
Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — Facebook allowed an exiled Moldovan oligarch with ties to the Kremlin to run ads calling for protests and uprisings against the pro-Western government, even though he and his political party were on U.S. sanctions lists.
The ads featuring politician and convicted fraudster Ilan Shor were ultimately removed by Facebook but not before they were seen millions of times in Moldova, a small nation of about 2.6 million sandwiched between Romania and war-torn Ukraine.
Seeking to exploit anger over inflation and rising fuel prices, the paid posts from Shor's political party targeted the government of pro-Western President Maia Sandu, who earlier this week detailed what she said was a Russian plot to topple her government using external saboteurs.
“Destabilization attempts are a reality and for our institutions, they represent a real challenge,” Sandu said Thursday as she swore in a new government led by pro-Western Prime Minister Dorin Recean, her former defense and security adviser. “We need decisive steps to strengthen the security of the country.”
The ads reveal how Russia and its allies have exploited lapses by social media platforms — like Facebook, many of them operated by U.S. companies — to spread propaganda and disinformation that weaponizes economic and social insecurity in an attempt to undermine governments in Eastern Europe.
Shor's ads have helped fuel angry protests against the government and appear to be aimed at destabilizing Moldova and returning it to Russia's sphere of influence, according to Dorin Frasineau, a foreign policy adviser to former Moldovan Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita, whose resignation led to the formation of the new government on Thursday.
“Even though he is on the U.S. sanctions list, I still see sponsored ads on Facebook,” Frasineau said, saying he had spotted what he believes were fake accounts sharing the posts this week. He said the Moldovan government sought answers from Facebook to no avail. “We have talked with Facebook, but it is very hard because there is no specific person, no contact.”
Rules governing the sanctions list prohibit U.S. companies from engaging in financial transactions with listed individuals and groups. The U.S. Treasury Department, which manages the sanctions program, declined to comment publicly when asked about the ads.
In a statement to The Associated Press, Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, said it removed the posts as soon as it found them.
“When Ilan Shor and the Shor Party were added to the U.S. sanctions list, we took action on their known accounts," a company spokesperson said. “When we identified new associated accounts, we took action on those, as well. We adhere to U.S. sanctions laws and will continue working to detect and enforce against fake accounts and pages that violate our policies.”
Meta, which recently announced deep layoffs, did not respond to questions about the size of its staff in Moldova, or the number of employees who speak Moldovan. Like many big tech firms based in the U.S., Meta has sometimes struggled to moderate content in languages other than English.
The ads were identified by researchers at Reset, a London-based nonprofit that researches social media’s impact on democracy, who shared their findings with The Associated Press. Felix Kartte, a senior adviser at Reset, said Meta’s response to disinformation and propaganda in Moldova could have sweeping implications for European security.
“Their platforms continue to be weaponized by the Kremlin and Russian secret services, and because of the company’s inaction, the U.S. and Europe risk losing a key ally in the region,” said Kartte, who is based in Berlin.
Nine different paid posts from the Shor Party ran on Facebook after the U.S. imposed sanctions. Most were removed within a week after the sanctions announcement, though Shor bought another paid post in January, two months after he was sanctioned. All were clearly identifiable by Shor's name.
The posts can be found on Facebook’s online advertisement library, which contains a searchable catalogue.
The library confirms the ads placed by Shor and his party were seen millions of times before they were ultimately removed.
The most recent ad, taken down a month ago, was pulled because it failed to include a disclaimer about the ad's sponsor, according to a notation attached to one of the videos in the library. The library does not mention the sanctions.
Nonetheless, they were effective. One ad, which ran on Facebook for just two days — October 29-30 — was seen more than a million times in Moldova. In the post, which cost Shor’s party less than $100 to upload, the oligarch accuses Sandu’s government of corruption and kleptocracy.
“You and I will have to pull them out of their offices by the ears and throw them out of our country like evil spirits,” Shor tells the audience.
Shor, 35, is an Israeli-born Moldovan oligarch who leads the populist, Russia-friendly Shor Party. Currently living in exile in Israel, Shor is implicated in a $1 billion theft from Moldovan banks in 2014; is accused of bribery to secure his position as chair of a Moldovan bank, and was named in October on a U.S. Treasury Department sanctions list as working for Russian interests.
The U.S. says Shor worked with “corrupt oligarchs and Moscow-based entities to create political unrest in Moldova” and to undermine the country’s bid to join the EU. The sanctions list also names the Shor Party and Shor's wife, a Russian pop star. The U.K. also added Shor to a sanctions list last December.
Last fall, Moldova was rocked by a series of anti-government protests initiated by the Shor Party, which saw thousands take to the streets in the capital, Chisinau, at a time of skyrocketing inflation and an acute energy crisis after Russia reduced gas supplies to Moldova.
Many of the protesters called for early elections and demanded Sandu's resignation.
Around the same time, Moldova’s government filed a request to the country’s Constitutional Court to declare the Shor Party illegal, a case that is ongoing. Moldova’s anti-corruption prosecutors’ office also opened an investigation into the financing of the protests, which prosecutors said involved at least some Russian money.
On Monday, Sandu went public with what she claimed was a plot by Moscow to overthrow the government using external saboteurs, to put the nation “at the disposal of Russia” and to derail it off its course to one day join the EU.
Sandu said the purported Russian plot envisioned attacks on government buildings, hostage-takings and other violent actions by groups of saboteurs. Russia has since strongly denied those claims.
Once part of the Soviet Union, Moldova declared its independence in 1991. In recent years, the country has lurched from one political crisis to another, often caught in limbo between pro-Russian and pro-Western sentiments.
But in 2021, after decades of largely oligarchic power structures and various Russia-friendly leaders, Moldovans elected a pro-Western, pro-European government, which put it on a more distinctly Western-oriented path. In June, Moldova was granted EU candidate status, the same day as Ukraine.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
0
Options
mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,788
Meta fined record $1.3 billion and ordered to stop sending European user data to US
By Kelvin Chan
Today
LONDON (AP) — The European Union slapped Meta with a record $1.3 billion privacy fine Monday and ordered it to stop transferring users' personal information across the Atlantic by October, the latest salvo in a decadelong case sparked by U.S. cybersnooping fears.
The penalty of 1.2 billion euros is the biggest since the EU's strict data privacy regime took effect five years ago, surpassing Amazon's 746 million euro fine in 2021 for data protection violations.
Meta, which had previously warned that services for its users in Europe could be cut off, vowed to appeal and ask courts to immediately put the decision on hold.
The company said “there is no immediate disruption to Facebook in Europe.” The decision applies to user data like names, email and IP addresses, messages, viewing history, geolocation data and other information that Meta — and other tech giants like Google — use for targeted online ads.
“This decision is flawed, unjustified and sets a dangerous precedent for the countless other companies transferring data between the EU and U.S.,” Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, and chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead said in a statement.
It's yet another twist in a legal battle that began in 2013 when Austrian lawyer and privacy activist Max Schrems filed a complaint about Facebook’s handling of his data following former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of electronic surveillance by U.S. security agencies. That included the disclosure that Facebook gave the agencies access to the personal data of Europeans.
The saga has highlighted the clash between Washington and Brussels over the differences between Europe's strict view on data privacy and the comparatively lax regime in the U.S., which lacks a federal privacy law. The EU has been a global leader in reining in the power of Big Tech with a series of regulations forcing them police their platforms more strictly and protect users' personal information.
An agreement covering EU-U.S. data transfers known as the Privacy Shield was struck down in 2020 by the EU's top court, which said it didn’t do enough to protect residents from the U.S. government's electronic prying. Monday's decision confirmed that another tool to govern data transfers — stock legal contracts — was also invalid.
Brussels and Washington signed a deal last year on a reworked Privacy Shield that Meta could use, but the pact is awaiting a decision from European officials on whether it adequately protects data privacy.
EU institutions have been reviewing the agreement, and the bloc's lawmakers this month called for improvements, saying the safeguards aren't strong enough.
The Ireland’s Data Protection Commission handed down the fine as Meta’s lead privacy regulator in the 27-nation bloc because the Silicon Valley tech giant’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.
The Irish watchdog said it gave Meta five months to stop sending European user data to the U.S. and six months to bring its data operations into compliance “by ceasing the unlawful processing, including storage, in the U.S." of European users' personal data transferred in violation of the bloc's privacy rules.
In other words, Meta has to erase all that data, which could be a bigger problem than the fine, said Johnny Ryan, senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, a nonprofit rights group that has worked on digital and data issues.
“This order to delete data is really a headache for Meta,” Ryan said. If the company has to scrub data for hundreds of millions of European Union users going back 10 years, “it is very hard to see how it will be able to comply with that order.”
If a new transatlantic privacy agreement does take effect before the deadlines, "our services can continue as they do today without any disruption or impact on users," Meta said.
Schrems predicted that Meta has “no real chance” of getting the decision materially overturned. And a new privacy pact might not mean the end of Meta's troubles, because there's a good chance it could be tossed out by the EU's top court, he said.
“Meta plans to rely on the new deal for transfers going forward, but this is likely not a permanent fix," Schrems said in a statement. "Unless U.S. surveillance laws gets fixed, Meta will likely have to keep EU data in the EU.”
Schrems said a possible solution could be a “federated” social network, where European data stays in Meta's data centers in Europe, "unless users for example chat with a U.S. friend.”
Meta warned in its latest earnings report that without a legal basis for data transfers, it will be forced to stop offering its products and services in Europe, “which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.”
The social media company might have to carry out a costly and complex revamp of its operations if it's ultimately forced to stop the transfers. Meta has a fleet of 21 data centers, according to its website, but 17 of them are in the United States. Three others are in the European nations of Denmark, Ireland and Sweden. Another is in Singapore.
Other social media giants are facing pressure over their data practices. TikTok has tried to soothe Western fears about the Chinese-owned short video sharing app's potential cybersecurity risks with a $1.5 billion project to store U.S. user data on Oracle servers.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
0
Options
mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,788
Facebook faces legal setback in EU court decision on data privacy and ads
Yesterday
LONDON (AP) — Facebook lost a legal challenge Tuesday at the European Union's top court over a groundbreaking German antitrust decision that limited the way the company uses data for advertising.
The European Court of Justice said competition watchdogs can consider whether companies like Facebook comply with the continent's strict privacy rules, which are normally enforced by national data privacy regulators.
The court ruled that antitrust authorities can take into account any violations of data privacy rules as they investigate whether tech giants are abusing their dominance in the market by boxing out competitors.
“We are evaluating the court’s decision and will have more to say in due course,” Facebook parent Meta said in a statement.
The court sided with a 2019 German antitrust ruling that threatened to upend Meta's business model of selling ads targeted to users based on data gleaned from how they spend time on its services.
Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, appealed that finding, which led German authorities to seek an opinion from the Court of Justice, the 27-nation bloc's top tribunal.
The German Federal Cartel Office, or Bundeskartellamt, wasn’t contesting the company's use of customer data to target ads to users on Facebook.
But it said for the company to combine data from all the services it runs to target ads more precisely, Facebook should have to first get permission separately from the other apps and websites to do so.
At issue is the way Facebook gains consent from users to process their data.
A press release summarizing the court's decision said the company “cannot justify” claiming “legitimate interest” as a reason for using personal data to serve ads to users. Under European Union privacy rules, users need to freely give consent for their data to be used.
The EU court's decision will have “far-reaching effects on the business models of the data economy,” said Andreas Mundt, president of the German Federal Cartel Office.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
0
Options
mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,788
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Comments
WASHINGTON (AP) — Facebook allowed an exiled Moldovan oligarch with ties to the Kremlin to run ads calling for protests and uprisings against the pro-Western government, even though he and his political party were on U.S. sanctions lists.
The ads featuring politician and convicted fraudster Ilan Shor were ultimately removed by Facebook but not before they were seen millions of times in Moldova, a small nation of about 2.6 million sandwiched between Romania and war-torn Ukraine.
Seeking to exploit anger over inflation and rising fuel prices, the paid posts from Shor's political party targeted the government of pro-Western President Maia Sandu, who earlier this week detailed what she said was a Russian plot to topple her government using external saboteurs.
“Destabilization attempts are a reality and for our institutions, they represent a real challenge,” Sandu said Thursday as she swore in a new government led by pro-Western Prime Minister Dorin Recean, her former defense and security adviser. “We need decisive steps to strengthen the security of the country.”
The ads reveal how Russia and its allies have exploited lapses by social media platforms — like Facebook, many of them operated by U.S. companies — to spread propaganda and disinformation that weaponizes economic and social insecurity in an attempt to undermine governments in Eastern Europe.
TECHNOLOGY
Is Bing too belligerent? Microsoft looks to tame AI chatbot
China sanctions Lockheed Martin, Raytheon for Taiwan sales
Judge suggests jail to limit FTX founder's communications
US launches artificial intelligence military use initiative
Shor's ads have helped fuel angry protests against the government and appear to be aimed at destabilizing Moldova and returning it to Russia's sphere of influence, according to Dorin Frasineau, a foreign policy adviser to former Moldovan Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita, whose resignation led to the formation of the new government on Thursday.
“Even though he is on the U.S. sanctions list, I still see sponsored ads on Facebook,” Frasineau said, saying he had spotted what he believes were fake accounts sharing the posts this week. He said the Moldovan government sought answers from Facebook to no avail. “We have talked with Facebook, but it is very hard because there is no specific person, no contact.”
Rules governing the sanctions list prohibit U.S. companies from engaging in financial transactions with listed individuals and groups. The U.S. Treasury Department, which manages the sanctions program, declined to comment publicly when asked about the ads.
In a statement to The Associated Press, Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, said it removed the posts as soon as it found them.
“When Ilan Shor and the Shor Party were added to the U.S. sanctions list, we took action on their known accounts," a company spokesperson said. “When we identified new associated accounts, we took action on those, as well. We adhere to U.S. sanctions laws and will continue working to detect and enforce against fake accounts and pages that violate our policies.”
Meta, which recently announced deep layoffs, did not respond to questions about the size of its staff in Moldova, or the number of employees who speak Moldovan. Like many big tech firms based in the U.S., Meta has sometimes struggled to moderate content in languages other than English.
The ads were identified by researchers at Reset, a London-based nonprofit that researches social media’s impact on democracy, who shared their findings with The Associated Press. Felix Kartte, a senior adviser at Reset, said Meta’s response to disinformation and propaganda in Moldova could have sweeping implications for European security.
“Their platforms continue to be weaponized by the Kremlin and Russian secret services, and because of the company’s inaction, the U.S. and Europe risk losing a key ally in the region,” said Kartte, who is based in Berlin.
Nine different paid posts from the Shor Party ran on Facebook after the U.S. imposed sanctions. Most were removed within a week after the sanctions announcement, though Shor bought another paid post in January, two months after he was sanctioned. All were clearly identifiable by Shor's name.
The posts can be found on Facebook’s online advertisement library, which contains a searchable catalogue.
The library confirms the ads placed by Shor and his party were seen millions of times before they were ultimately removed.
The most recent ad, taken down a month ago, was pulled because it failed to include a disclaimer about the ad's sponsor, according to a notation attached to one of the videos in the library. The library does not mention the sanctions.
The ads weren’t money makers for Meta, generating only about $15,000 in revenue, a pittance for a company that earned $4.65 billion in the last quarter.
Nonetheless, they were effective. One ad, which ran on Facebook for just two days — October 29-30 — was seen more than a million times in Moldova. In the post, which cost Shor’s party less than $100 to upload, the oligarch accuses Sandu’s government of corruption and kleptocracy.
“You and I will have to pull them out of their offices by the ears and throw them out of our country like evil spirits,” Shor tells the audience.
Shor, 35, is an Israeli-born Moldovan oligarch who leads the populist, Russia-friendly Shor Party. Currently living in exile in Israel, Shor is implicated in a $1 billion theft from Moldovan banks in 2014; is accused of bribery to secure his position as chair of a Moldovan bank, and was named in October on a U.S. Treasury Department sanctions list as working for Russian interests.
The U.S. says Shor worked with “corrupt oligarchs and Moscow-based entities to create political unrest in Moldova” and to undermine the country’s bid to join the EU. The sanctions list also names the Shor Party and Shor's wife, a Russian pop star. The U.K. also added Shor to a sanctions list last December.
Last fall, Moldova was rocked by a series of anti-government protests initiated by the Shor Party, which saw thousands take to the streets in the capital, Chisinau, at a time of skyrocketing inflation and an acute energy crisis after Russia reduced gas supplies to Moldova.
Many of the protesters called for early elections and demanded Sandu's resignation.
Around the same time, Moldova’s government filed a request to the country’s Constitutional Court to declare the Shor Party illegal, a case that is ongoing. Moldova’s anti-corruption prosecutors’ office also opened an investigation into the financing of the protests, which prosecutors said involved at least some Russian money.
On Monday, Sandu went public with what she claimed was a plot by Moscow to overthrow the government using external saboteurs, to put the nation “at the disposal of Russia” and to derail it off its course to one day join the EU.
Sandu said the purported Russian plot envisioned attacks on government buildings, hostage-takings and other violent actions by groups of saboteurs. Russia has since strongly denied those claims.
Once part of the Soviet Union, Moldova declared its independence in 1991. In recent years, the country has lurched from one political crisis to another, often caught in limbo between pro-Russian and pro-Western sentiments.
But in 2021, after decades of largely oligarchic power structures and various Russia-friendly leaders, Moldovans elected a pro-Western, pro-European government, which put it on a more distinctly Western-oriented path. In June, Moldova was granted EU candidate status, the same day as Ukraine.
—
McGrath reported from Sighisoara, Romania.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
LONDON (AP) — The European Union slapped Meta with a record $1.3 billion privacy fine Monday and ordered it to stop transferring users' personal information across the Atlantic by October, the latest salvo in a decadelong case sparked by U.S. cybersnooping fears.
The penalty of 1.2 billion euros is the biggest since the EU's strict data privacy regime took effect five years ago, surpassing Amazon's 746 million euro fine in 2021 for data protection violations.
Meta, which had previously warned that services for its users in Europe could be cut off, vowed to appeal and ask courts to immediately put the decision on hold.
The company said “there is no immediate disruption to Facebook in Europe.” The decision applies to user data like names, email and IP addresses, messages, viewing history, geolocation data and other information that Meta — and other tech giants like Google — use for targeted online ads.
TECHNOLOGY
TikTok files lawsuit to overturn Montana's 1st-in-nation ban on the video sharing app
An Iranian nuclear facility is so deep underground that US airstrikes likely couldn’t reach it
US bomb designed to hit targets like Iran underground nuclear sites briefly reappears amid tensions
Montana is banning TikTok. But can the state enforce the law and fend off lawsuits?
“This decision is flawed, unjustified and sets a dangerous precedent for the countless other companies transferring data between the EU and U.S.,” Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, and chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead said in a statement.
It's yet another twist in a legal battle that began in 2013 when Austrian lawyer and privacy activist Max Schrems filed a complaint about Facebook’s handling of his data following former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of electronic surveillance by U.S. security agencies. That included the disclosure that Facebook gave the agencies access to the personal data of Europeans.
The saga has highlighted the clash between Washington and Brussels over the differences between Europe's strict view on data privacy and the comparatively lax regime in the U.S., which lacks a federal privacy law. The EU has been a global leader in reining in the power of Big Tech with a series of regulations forcing them police their platforms more strictly and protect users' personal information.
An agreement covering EU-U.S. data transfers known as the Privacy Shield was struck down in 2020 by the EU's top court, which said it didn’t do enough to protect residents from the U.S. government's electronic prying. Monday's decision confirmed that another tool to govern data transfers — stock legal contracts — was also invalid.
Brussels and Washington signed a deal last year on a reworked Privacy Shield that Meta could use, but the pact is awaiting a decision from European officials on whether it adequately protects data privacy.
EU institutions have been reviewing the agreement, and the bloc's lawmakers this month called for improvements, saying the safeguards aren't strong enough.
The Ireland’s Data Protection Commission handed down the fine as Meta’s lead privacy regulator in the 27-nation bloc because the Silicon Valley tech giant’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.
The Irish watchdog said it gave Meta five months to stop sending European user data to the U.S. and six months to bring its data operations into compliance “by ceasing the unlawful processing, including storage, in the U.S." of European users' personal data transferred in violation of the bloc's privacy rules.
In other words, Meta has to erase all that data, which could be a bigger problem than the fine, said Johnny Ryan, senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, a nonprofit rights group that has worked on digital and data issues.
“This order to delete data is really a headache for Meta,” Ryan said. If the company has to scrub data for hundreds of millions of European Union users going back 10 years, “it is very hard to see how it will be able to comply with that order.”
If a new transatlantic privacy agreement does take effect before the deadlines, "our services can continue as they do today without any disruption or impact on users," Meta said.
Schrems predicted that Meta has “no real chance” of getting the decision materially overturned. And a new privacy pact might not mean the end of Meta's troubles, because there's a good chance it could be tossed out by the EU's top court, he said.
“Meta plans to rely on the new deal for transfers going forward, but this is likely not a permanent fix," Schrems said in a statement. "Unless U.S. surveillance laws gets fixed, Meta will likely have to keep EU data in the EU.”
Schrems said a possible solution could be a “federated” social network, where European data stays in Meta's data centers in Europe, "unless users for example chat with a U.S. friend.”
Meta warned in its latest earnings report that without a legal basis for data transfers, it will be forced to stop offering its products and services in Europe, “which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.”
The social media company might have to carry out a costly and complex revamp of its operations if it's ultimately forced to stop the transfers. Meta has a fleet of 21 data centers, according to its website, but 17 of them are in the United States. Three others are in the European nations of Denmark, Ireland and Sweden. Another is in Singapore.
Other social media giants are facing pressure over their data practices. TikTok has tried to soothe Western fears about the Chinese-owned short video sharing app's potential cybersecurity risks with a $1.5 billion project to store U.S. user data on Oracle servers.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
LONDON (AP) — Facebook lost a legal challenge Tuesday at the European Union's top court over a groundbreaking German antitrust decision that limited the way the company uses data for advertising.
The European Court of Justice said competition watchdogs can consider whether companies like Facebook comply with the continent's strict privacy rules, which are normally enforced by national data privacy regulators.
The court ruled that antitrust authorities can take into account any violations of data privacy rules as they investigate whether tech giants are abusing their dominance in the market by boxing out competitors.
“We are evaluating the court’s decision and will have more to say in due course,” Facebook parent Meta said in a statement.
The court sided with a 2019 German antitrust ruling that threatened to upend Meta's business model of selling ads targeted to users based on data gleaned from how they spend time on its services.
TECHNOLOGY
Ransomware criminals are dumping kids' private files online after school hacks
Judge limits Biden administration in working with social media companies
Meta looks to target Twitter with a rival app called Threads
North Korean satellite wasn’t advanced enough to conduct reconnaissance from space, Seoul says
Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, appealed that finding, which led German authorities to seek an opinion from the Court of Justice, the 27-nation bloc's top tribunal.
Tuesday's decision could pave the way for stricter scrutiny of tech companies. Europe has taken a pioneering role in reining in the power of big digital platforms with sweeping new standards taking effect next month and rules in the works on artificial intelligence.
The German Federal Cartel Office, or Bundeskartellamt, wasn’t contesting the company's use of customer data to target ads to users on Facebook.
But it said for the company to combine data from all the services it runs to target ads more precisely, Facebook should have to first get permission separately from the other apps and websites to do so.
At issue is the way Facebook gains consent from users to process their data.
A press release summarizing the court's decision said the company “cannot justify” claiming “legitimate interest” as a reason for using personal data to serve ads to users. Under European Union privacy rules, users need to freely give consent for their data to be used.
The EU court's decision will have “far-reaching effects on the business models of the data economy,” said Andreas Mundt, president of the German Federal Cartel Office.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14