Advertising is an essential part of Meta’s business model, both on Facebook and in other company services, and also due to the integration of some of them into third-party services and web pages, with the “Like” button as the main exponent of this extension of the company’s tentacles more beyond their own platforms. This is not, per se, neither good nor bad, it depends on the informed criteria of each user of said services and functions.
The most astute reader will have reacted, surely, when I have adjectived the criterion with “informed”, and it is normal, because if many of these services have been characterized for years by something, and once again Meta with Facebook is among the top positions, it is because it has not provided complete control to the user over this type of function, nor has it informed as thoroughly as would have been desirable about, for example, the consequences of clicking the “Like” button on a post on a web page not linked to Meta. And the main consequence of this is that with each action of this type, we are providing more information, which the company later uses to draw up a terribly precise profile of users and their consumption habits, something key to fine-tuning the advertising that is used to the maximum. will show you.
This has meant that, since the last decade, various authorities have Meta in their sights, and a very active example of this can be found in Germany, which already wanted to impose strict limitations on Meta’s operations, in a process that was elevated by the American technology company to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The response from the common European space is expected to take place next July, and everything indicates that it will be much more aligned with the German approach than with Meta’s aspirations.
So much so that, as we can read in TechCrunch, Meta will allow users to opt out of cross-site tracking. To this end, the technology company will soon offer its users a new section in the account control center in which they must adequately inform about the various monitoring functions that it currently uses and, based on said information, it will also offer the tools necessary for users to refuse such tracking.
Although the germ of the implementation of this new function is found in the German position, the entire European Union seems quite aligned with the German position and, as we have seen on other occasions, it is possible that other regions decide to adopt similar policies. Thus, and probably to avoid more problems of this type, this new element of the account control center will be rolled out globallythat is, it will be available to users of Meta services worldwide, not just in Germany or Europe.
Now, the German authority affirms that Some aspects of Meta’s implementation of these new features still need to be polished.such as the texts that describe the effects of these functions, and that is that if the descriptions are vague, omit important information about how they affect the user’s privacy, etc., in such a case the decision will not be informed, which is the main objective that has haunted Germany for years.
