Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Meta has been fined for unlawfully processing user data to gain market advantage. on thursday, reuters A Madrid court was reported to have ordered the company to pay €479 million ($552 million) in damages to 87 Spanish media outlets. This fine has been imposed due to the company changing its legal basis for collecting personal data after the new rules came into effect.
The court found that Meta’s data collection practices violated the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – and, by extension, Spanish antitrust law. After the GDPR took effect in 2018, the company changed its legal basis for collecting data on Facebook and Instagram from user consent to “required for the performance of a contract.”
Regulators later ruled against that justification, and Meta returned to user consent as its basis in 2023. But Spanish digital media outlets sued for damages, leading to the fine imposed today. The court ruled that Meta gained a “significant competitive advantage” by processing user data in this way. The court calculated the fine as a percentage of the company’s advertising revenue over the five years that the unlawful logic was used.
“The illegal treatment of this enormous amount of personal data meant that Meta had an advantage that Spanish online media could not match,” the Madrid court wrote in a statement. The Associated Press“Meta’s actions harmed online advertising revenues of Spanish digital media outlets.”
Meta protested against the fine and said it would be appealed. “This is a baseless claim with no evidence of alleged harm and deliberately ignores how the online advertising industry works,” the company wrote in a statement. reuters“Meta complies with all applicable laws and has provided clear choices, transparent information and given users multiple tools to control their experience on our services,”