Groundbreaking settlement for Foxglove senior fellow Tanya O’Carroll as Facebook agrees to stop using her data for targeted advertising
For the first time in the UK, a person has secured agreement from Meta to switch off Facebook’s creepy surveillance-based targeted advertising, which sifts through our most personal and sensitive data to sell us things.
It may now be possible for others to do the same, as government regulator the Information Commissioner (ICO) has backed Tanya, that data protection law gives her the right to opt out.
Meta’s response is a classic straw man argument, whinging that: “No business can be mandated to give away its services for free.”
Sure, except publishers have used advertising as an important source of revenue for hundreds of years, with few problems as long as they didn’t break the law.
Big Tech’s surveillance advertising broke from this model in two key ways. First, by harvesting our personal data to serve us ads – in Tanya’s case, serving her floods of baby content after she became pregnant – giving them a new and terrifying advantage over their competitors for targeting ads.
This had a chilling effect both on our privacy and on the income of other businesses that rely on advertising income. You might have found being bombarded with ads for the Cillit Bang man Barry Scott irritating during a TV ad break, but at least Barry didn’t follow you home to peek through your bathroom window and root through your bins to try and work out what else he might be able to sell you.
Second, the monopoly on social media held by companies like Meta stops us from voting with our feet when advertising is targeted in a way we’re not comfortable with. In the last two decades, Meta has been able to gobble up an astonishing amount of our information infrastructure.
With Facebook and Instagram, they own two of the most popular social media platforms in the world. With WhatsApp, they own the main peer-to-peer communication tool in the world. That gives Meta an unprecedented stash of our personal data to ream through to sell us ads.
Nothing is stopping Meta from advertising in the same way that newspapers, TV and other publishers have done in the past.
But the reason they don’t want to do that is it would stop them using the troves of our personal data they have collected on all of us from the different products they own to convince advertisers they are the best marketplace, so should be paid top dollar.
If others are able to use the right to opt out that the regulator has affirmed as a result of Tanya’s challenge, then Meta may find out for the first time in a long time what it’s like to exist in a competitive marketplace – and that will be a good thing for everyone, except Big Tech monopolists like Mark Zuckerberg.
We’re thrilled for Tanya securing this favourable settlement after a long and gruelling legal process and can’t wait to see what happens next.