Security News > 2023 > September > Norway wants Facebook behavioral advertising banned across Europe

Norway has told the European Data Protection Board it believes a countrywide ban on Meta harvesting user data to serve up advertising on Facebook and Instagram should be made permanent and extended across Europe.

The Scandinavian country's Data Protection Authority, Datatilsynet, had been holding back Facebook parent Meta from scooping up data on its citizens with the threat of fines of one million Kroner per day if it didn't comply.

We believe that the General Data Protection Regulation must be interpreted consistently throughout the EU/EEA, and we ask for the ban to be extended to the rest of Europe.

Meta, which has been fielding GDPR lawsuits in Europe and the UK for years, said last month it would seek explicit consent from people in the EU, EEA, and Switzerland before using their data to serve up ads targeted at them personally.

The United Kingdom was notably absent from that list of countries that Meta is moving to a "Consent" basis for processing, despite the rules being roughly the same under UK GDPR. The British government is in the process of trying to replace the EU legislation - which is still part of UK law under the Data Protection Act - by passing the Data Protection and Digital Information bill.

The new bill, on the face of it, removes several data subject protections including oversight of public surveillance cameras, and potentially data adequacy with the EU, affecting every UK business that collects and processes EU data.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/09/29/norway_facebook_behavioral_ads/