Meta denies it has to alter the way it operates in response to the EU ruling, claiming it just needs to find a new way to legally justify how it processes people’s data. “We want to reassure users and businesses that they can continue to benefit from personalized advertising across the EU through Meta’s platforms,” the company said in a statement.
However Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist whose nonprofit NOYB filed both complaints addressed in the ruling, calls this response “PR bullshit” and argues that Meta is trying to avoid telling investors it has run out of legal arguments to defend its business model.
This ruling is part of a wider move away from the unregulated model of online advertising that existed for years, according to Schrems. Five years ago, Europe sparked a legal shift by introducing GDPR—even though the new privacy rules were not effectively enforced, he says. That legal shift was followed by what Schrems calls “technical shifts,” in the form of privacy changes introduced by Google and Apple. “We’re [seeing] the combination of technical and legal shifts moving in the same direction,” he says.
As Apple’s changes take a chunk out of Meta, Google is trying to remake advertising cookies. It’s a plan that’s proven controversial, and in July Google delayed the phaseout to the second half of 2024, citing advertisers’ requests for more time. Opposition to the phaseout does not just come from the tech sector. A coalition of Germany’s largest publishers, including the owner of news outlets Bild and Politico, complained last year that without cookies, their revenues would suffer.
Despite Google’s planned move away from cookies, the company has claimed that ditching personalized advertising altogether would jeopardize the authority of information online. “That won’t pay for the web everyone wants,” Claire Noburn, Google’s ads privacy lead, argued in a September op-ed, adding that getting rid of personalized advertising would deprive the open web, including publishers, of crucial funds.
Some envision an opt-in economy. “If everything becomes opt-in in the future, I think we have gained a lot because then we will actually have to understand what we’re opting into,” says Pernille Tranberg, cofounder of Danish think tank Data Ethics EU. Tranberg is not against personalized advertising, but she wants to choose which sites she gives her data to, depending on their reputation—she probably wouldn’t give her data to Facebook, she says, but she might give it to a newspaper or a bookstore.
Others are more hardline about the future. Access Now’s Masse advocates for a shift to tracker-free contextual advertising, which tailors ads dependent on context. An article about cars might feature a Volkswagen advert, for example.
But not everyone agrees on the definition of contextual ads. And parts of the ad industry are still trying to figure out how they can include personalization within the contextual ad model, according to Masse. Yesterday’s ruling from the EU might signal we are entering a new era of online advertising and that surveillance capitalism is taking its last gasp. But with personalized ads being proposed as part of an alternative system, what comes next might not look that different.
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