Meta is addressing the European Union’s desire for increased privacy efforts.
The tech giant stated in a press release that it has taken “concerted efforts to comply with EU regulation” but has received “additional demands” that “go beyond what is written in the law.”
European regulatory environment tightened earlier this year with the implementation of the EU’s flagship market contestability rule (the Digital Markets Act, or DMA).
The company also announced that it would “offer people in the EU an additional new choice to use Facebook and Instagram for free with less personalized ads.”
European Facebook and Instagram users will also be able to enjoy an ad-free experience for significantly less.
Newsng gathered Meta is lowering the price of its EU-only membership to remove ads from apps and websites by 40%.
This reduces the pricing from €9.99 ($10.60) to €5.99 ($6.36) for those who only access them through the web, and from €12.99 ($13.78) to €7.99 ($8.48) for those who access them via mobile.
“Over the coming weeks, people in the EU who choose to use Facebook and Instagram for free with ads will be able to choose to see ‘less personalized ads,'” Meta said in the blog post.
“This less personalized ads option relies on less data, so we’ll show ads based only on context – what a person sees in a particular session on Facebook and Instagram – and a minimal set of data points including a person’s age, location, gender, and how a person engages with ads.”
Users in the region who choose not to pay a subscription fee that Meta introduced just over a year ago (for ad-free versions of its social media services) will soon be shown ads that use less personal data for “context”-based targeting than is currently the case, the company announced in a blog post announcing a change within “weeks” to how it targets ads at EU users, which was first reported by the WSJ.
We earlier reported that Brazil’s Collective Defence Institute, a consumer rights organisation, had filed two lawsuits against the Brazilian branches of TikTok, Kwai, and Meta Platforms, seeking 3 billion reais ($525 million).
