Could Spain’s newspapers be about to turn the tables on Meta?
Spain’s Media Association (AMI) is suing Meta for systematically breaching the country’s privacy laws over the course of several years, claiming €550 million in compensation for the unfair advantage Meta’s “systematic and massive non-compliance” gave it in shaping the advertising market.
This is an issue I have been commenting on for many years: by creating a machine designed to extract as much personal information as possible from its users, and by collecting that information and reselling it to the highest bidder, Meta positioned itself as the only channel able to segment advertising campaigns to fit almost any criteria, and in doing so made itself essential to many advertisers.
The problem is that this model was built on a violation of a fundamental social consensus: we have learned to live with advertising over the last century or so because we are only subjected to it depending on what we’re reading, watching or listening to or where we are, the point being that advertisers have little other idea about who we are or what our interests are.
Meta found a way around this: its apps collect data that reflects anything we can imagine: our explicit (provided by us) or implicit (inferred based on our behavior) personal data, our preferences of all kinds, what makes us react, the content of…
