Mark your calendar European friends: July 4th could soon be celebrated as independence-from-Meta’s-surveillance-capitalism-day… A long-anticipated judgement handed down today by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) looks to have comprehensively crushed the social media giant’s ability to keep flouting EU privacy law by denying users a free choice over its tracking and profiling.
The ruling tracks back to a pioneering order by Germany’s antitrust watchdog, the Federal Cartel Office (FCO), which spent years investigating Facebook’s business — making the case that privacy harm should be treated as an exploitative competition abuse too.
In its February 2019 order, the FCO told Facebook (as Meta still was back then) to stop combining data on users across its own suite of so …
