Meta Gives Regulators a New Reason to Bite

tech.hindustantimes.com:

For all the difficulties that Meta Platforms Inc. is going through with declining ad revenues, higher costs related to its risky investment in the metaverse and its first major restructuring, the company has been relatively lucky with privacy regulators.

It has avoided the most detrimental fines under Europe's main privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, despite making billions of dollars from being one of the world's biggest processors of personal data. But that luck may be about to run out. Meta looks like it could struggle to comply with the European Union's upcoming antitrust law, which prohibits data combination and reuse.

In a recent court case related to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal(1), parent company Meta was unable to satisfy a request by a court-appointed special master to produce information about 149 of its internal data systems. Specifically, the special master wanted details on the functions of those systems, and how they were used by other business units in the company. Meta effectively replied it couldn't provide that information to the court. In other words, its own engineers appeared unaware of the full extent of user data that it held in what appeared to be a Byzantine network of different systems.

If that's still the case two years from now, Meta could be in serious trouble with European regulators. With its upcoming Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU will ban large internet platforms like Facebook from combining and reusing data, or using data from one part of their business to bolster another. The goal is to lower barriers to entry for other companies that struggle to compete with firms that have amassed mountains of user data to create dominant advertising