A Spanish court ordered Facebook owner Meta Platforms to pay local media outlets 479 million euros ($552.7 million) after a legal complaint over how the company processes user data for advertising.
Madrid’s commercial court said Thursday that it partially upheld a complaint alleging that Meta violated Spanish competition rules by breaching the European Union’s data-protection regulations.
It ordered the company to compensate 87 digital publishers and news agencies under the trade group Information Media Association (AMI), whose members include major outlets like business daily El Economista and national press agency EFE.
Meta said it disagreed with the ruling and would appeal. A spokesperson said the claim lacked evidence of alleged harm, and ignored how the online advertising industry works. Meta gives users opportunities to control their social-media experience, the spokesperson added.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation–which came into force in 2018–sets out guardrails for how websites can handle user data and obliges them to seek consent to process it.
In an effort to comply with the legislation, the Instagram and Whatsapp owner in 2018 changed the legal reason it used to justify its processing of personal data, saying it was being necessary to carry out a contract for its services. It has since come under scrutiny from privacy watchdogs. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined the company 1.2 billion euros in 2023 over its practices. Meta then changed the legal basis to being dependent on user consent in August 2023.
The Spanish court said that Meta’s earnings in Spain between the GDPR coming into effect and its privacy changes in 2023 gave it a competitive advantage, and that money made while in breach of the rules should be shared with competitors in the country’s digital advertising market.
AMI said in a statement that the ruling marks a historic legal victory for the association. “It is a judicial recognition of the economic harm caused by unfair competition based on the undue use of personal data,” it said. (Dow Jones)