this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Yeah, the sites themselves are going to either block Norway or turn off the ads for them. An overwhelmingly large portion of the internet uses targeted ads. This isn’t just a Facebook thing. For example, Google has an ad engine that runs on nearly every commercial website. This will take some work to comply with and I can see a lot of sites blocking Norway in the meantime.
The issue isn't advertising per se, it's with so called targeted advertising aka surveillance capitalism. Meta could still legally serve ads in Norway so long as they are not individually targeted. You know, like all ads before Google and Facebook invented mass surveillance of internet users.
To be more specific, they can serve targeted advertisement, but only based on metrics explicitly provided to Meta. Such as your facebook profile and pages you like/follow/interact with on their platforms.
The issue they're being fined for is using data collected from everywhere else online that is being used to build a sort of cross web advertisement profile for different individuals, that they basically have no say og controll over.
For example, Meta can't track my browser history or activities on say lemmy to build an ad profile and then serve me ads based on that. They would have to use whatever data is actually generated by my Facebook profile that is mostly inactive
Just because most companies do it, doesn’t mean it’s ok.
It’s not about targeted ads based on information provided by the user of the service. If you have read the article you would know that they are banning behavioral advertising.
At which point we arrive at OP's closing remark: "Either way, it's a win for Norway." And that's hard to dispute for any country taking its claim to being a democracy even halfway serious, considering the manipulative shenanigans that are par for the course at anything Meta.