Ireland Targets Facebook's Targeted Advertising and the Political Question of Privacy and Freedom on the Internet

Read Time:3 Minute, 20 Second

Ireland has punished Facebook for ignoring its data privacy laws:

Meta (META.O) was hit with a record 1.2 billion euro ($1.3 billion) fine by its lead European Union privacy regulator over its handling of user information and given five months to stop transferring users’ data to the United States.

The fine, imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), came after Meta continued to transfer data beyond a 2020 EU court ruling that invalidated an EU-U.S. data transfer pact. It tops the previous record EU privacy fine of 746 million euros handed by Luxembourg to Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) in 2021.
Meta hit with record $1.3 bln fine over data transfers | Reuters

What is interesting here is not the fine. Any fine small enough to not represent a multi-year slice of revenue is just a fee. What is interesting is that the agency has told Facebook that they must stop transferring EU citizen data to the US. If that they do that — and considering that this penalty came about because Facebook has already bene caught transferring data in violation of another ruling, I have my doubts — then their ad model and thus their revenue model could be severely impacted.

Facebook make its money by using your data to keep you engaged on the platform and then selling ads against what it knows about you. If it cannot transfer data to the US, then it cannot use your data in it’s add targeting and it cannot use your data to fine tune it’s global engagement algorithms.

Now, they could do EU versions of both, but both systems are made more valuable by having more data to work with. Having to slice that data into different bucket means that Meta’s algorithms will be less useful at keeping you engaged and less able to sell you adds. All of this stems from US data laws not protecting EU citizens to the same degree that EU laws do. This is good thing, in my opinion.

Countries should be able to have high standards for their citizens personal and privacy data. The same argument that the EU used against Facebook’s parent company should apply when arguing that US citizens should be protected from, say, a Chinese company like ByteDance. Countries should be able to protect their citizens, to decide via democratic means what is an is not allowed in commerce and advertising.

I can hear people arguing that such a regime will lead ot the balkanization of the interent, that different regions and countires will have different experiences. Perhaps. But that exists to a large degree already, given the Chinese restrictions. And the alternative is to either allow the lowest common denominator to win, or to pretend that we will somehow come up with technological solution that will make everythig okay.

We won’t. there is no solution that solves all the problems. Governments want access to communications streams for good (crime fighting) and ill (oppression). Companies want to keep people engaged and sell them personalized ads (I won’t pretend any of that is good). Citizens want privacy and convenience, and different groupings of people will want to balance those goods in different ways. There is no magic bullet that will make everyone involved happy all of the time, and it’s been a lie from the start to pretend that was the case. It is long past time we stopped pretending otherwise.

Politics is simply the means by which we get along, or not, with each other. The internet does not change the need for such accommodations, even if it changes the types of things we need to accommodate or how we communicate about those accommodations. Too many technology people want to pretend otherwise. It’s childish and harmful and the EU just provided us with a timely reminder of why. If you want to help solve these issues, put down your vi and start interacting with your local politicians.