Spanish court orders Meta to pay €479M to publishers over GDPR breach

A Spanish court has ordered Meta to pay €479 million to 87 digital media outlets and news agencies after ruling that the company gained an unlawful competitive advantage through its use of personal data for behavioural advertising.

Madrid’s Commercial Court said on Thursday that the compensation stems from Meta’s practices on Facebook and Instagram, where the company processed user data in violation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The court found that Meta’s data-processing framework gave the US technology group a “significant competitive advantage” in Spain’s online advertising market, breaching both the GDPR and the country’s antitrust law.

The complaint centred on Meta’s shift in legal basis for behavioural advertising in May 2018, when the GDPR came into force.

The company moved from seeking explicit user consent to relying on “necessity for the performance of a contract” to justify data-driven ad targeting.

Regulators subsequently deemed that justification insufficient under the privacy regime.

Meta reversed course in August 2023 and reinstated consent as the legal basis for these practices.

However, the judge estimated that Meta earned at least €5.3 billion in advertising revenue during the five-year period under review and treated the full amount as profit obtained in breach of the GDPR.

A similar claim is currently being examined in France. The ruling remains subject to appeal.

The decision adds to Meta’s growing list of legal challenges in Europe.

Last year, the European Commission imposed a fine of nearly €800 million, concluding that the company had tied Facebook Marketplace to Facebook and imposed unfair trading conditions on competitors in the online classifieds sector.

Spain’s government has taken additional steps targeting Meta’s data practices.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Wednesday that a lower house committee would investigate allegations that Meta used a hidden mechanism to track the web activity of Android device users.

Meta said it would cooperate with Spanish authorities.

Meta secures major legal win in the US

The Spanish ruling came just days after Meta won a significant legal victory in the United States.

A federal judge dismissed the Federal Trade Commission’s high-profile antitrust case seeking to unwind Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

The decision ends a years-long attempt by US regulators to challenge some of the most consequential deals in the tech sector.

In a memorandum opinion released Tuesday, Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court in Washington, DC, ruled that the FTC failed to prove Meta currently holds monopoly power in social networking.

“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now,” Boasberg said.

He concluded the FTC had not met that requirement, issuing a judgment in Meta’s favour.

The case was originally filed five years ago and had been viewed as a landmark test of US antitrust enforcement in the digital economy.