Meta still wants to ask permission for collecting personal data

Facebook and Instagram could in the future ask permission to collect data for personalized advertisements. Meta is said to have made a proposal for this, under pressure from European privacy regulators.

Meta has made such a proposal to the umbrella organization of European privacy supervisors, writes The Wall Street Journal. The proposal revolves around the basis on which it asks users for permission to collect data that will later be used for personalized advertising. This has been an important point of discussion for more than a year, in which Meta thinks fundamentally differently from privacy regulators, which is not surprising given Meta’s revenue model.

Under the GDPR, a company must have one of six legitimate bases for collecting data. Meta relied on the implementation agreement, which states that the collection is necessary to perform a service. According to Meta, users “entered into an agreement” with the company when they create an account. However, privacy regulators did not agree with this. Under pressure and after a fine of 390 million euros for that violation, Meta changed the basis earlier this year to a ‘legitimate interest’.

It soon became apparent that privacy regulators did not like this either. The Irish privacy regulator has already said it does not agree with those changes. The European Court of Justice also ruled on this. The Irish, and most other European regulators, want Facebook and Instagram to explicitly ask their users for permission to track them. Meta always opposed that, because there is a good chance that users don’t want that. The same practice on iOS has already caused a significant drop in revenue for social networks. Under the consent basis, users must still be given access to the service if they opt-out of tracking.

Now Meta has proposed asking permission as a basis. The company does warn that it may take a long time for the change to be implemented. Meta herself says it will be in three months, so it will take at least until the end of October before that happens. Meta has not yet confirmed the policy, but The Wall Street Journal says it was mentioned in discussions between Meta and the regulators.