The Norwegian order imposed a three-month ban on personalized and behavioral ad targeting against Meta, starting August 2023.

The order on July 14 by the Norwegian Data Protection Authority imposes a country-wide three-month ban on personalized and behavioral ad targeting against Meta, starting August 2023. This means advertisers may see higher costs and lower relevance.

Although Norway is the first country to enact an order like this, there could be others to follow suit. These rulings and bans may set the stage for other forced changes in a world of complex and ever-changing privacy regulations.

    • detectivemittens@beehaw.org
      14·
      11 months ago

      Given that they make >$30B a quarter in revenue, probably not. They probably count the fine of $100k/day as a cost of doing business.

      • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
        21·
        11 months ago

        Another option occurs to me: maybe Norway knows Facebook won’t care and just smells a way to make an easy $9,000,000. 😁

          • upstream@beehaw.org
            4·
            11 months ago

            But in theory we could actually use the money we fine Facebook.

            The sovereign fund is managed such that only a limited amount of it may be used per year.

            The idea is to keep growing it so that we don’t go from “rich on oil” to “living on the subway” at the flick of a switch when the oil age ends.

            I’m sure we would just squander the money, but at least in theory we could use them for something good.

            • reddwarf
              3·
              11 months ago

              I understand. I just wanted to point out that Norway is not some poor country in need of that sum as Norway does very fine on its own.

              • upstream@beehaw.org
                2·
                11 months ago

                Fines should never be about needing money. But they need to big enough to hurt enough for it not to be “the cost of doing business”.

    • Radiant_sir_radiant@beehaw.org
      3·
      11 months ago

      Facebook/Meta has a decades-long history of considering nine-figure fines to be normal business expenses. I doubt they’ll care. The only thing that could change this would probably be jail time for the managers who should have been aware of it.

      If past behaviour is anything to go by, they’ll probably try to make targeted advertising less obvious, then when caught cheating blame it on a simple mistake or a single rogue programmer. This has worked very well so far for most big tech companies.