Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram: Meta introduces new account overview

DThe Meta tech team presents a new overview of user accounts across various services such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. The US group is responding to the data protection requirements of the Federal Cartel Office, authorities in Bonn announced on Wednesday. According to this, users can “for the first time largely freely and informedly decide whether they want to use metaservices in isolation or link them together.”

Anyone who links their accounts to different metaservices unlocks additional features, “like sharing the same post across different services,” the cartel’s office explained. However, the user also authorizes Meta to use the linked data for advertising purposes.

European Court decision pending

The new feature dates back to an order from the Cartel Office in 2019. The authorities banned the group, then called Facebook, from combining user data from different sources into a profile without consent and using it, for example, for advertising purposes. Facebook/Meta sued this but lost in Germany before the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf.

The Court referred further questions on this matter to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for clarification in connection with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The final decision has not yet been made, according to the Federal Cartel Office, the European Court of Justice will announce this in early July. However, the Cartel Office and Meta have been in continuous negotiations to implement the 2019 decision.

“With Facebook’s 2019 decision based on a blanket prohibition of abuse, we have entered new antitrust territory,” said Andreas Mundt, head of the cartel’s office. “Now we see that the path to free and informed user decisions about how their data is handled is rocky, but it can be successful.”

Source: Frantfurter Allgemeine

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