According to engadget, the European Commission announced that Meta will soon let Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union choose to share less of their personal data, resulting in less personalized advertising. This change is set to begin rolling out in January 2025. The Commission notes this is the first time such a choice is being offered on Meta’s social networks, framing it as a binary option: consent to full data sharing for fully personalized ads, or opt for limited data sharing and more generic ads. This move comes after the Commission fined Meta €200 million over its “consent or pay” ad-free subscription plans, which launched in 2023 and saw “very little interest” from users. In its statement, Meta defended personalized ads, claiming they were linked to €213 billion in EU economic activity and 1.44 million jobs last year.
The Never-Ending DMA Dance
Here’s the thing: this feels like the latest, carefully choreographed step in a regulatory tango that’s been going on for years. Meta gets a new rule or a massive fine—like that €200 million penalty—and then engineers the most minimal, letter-of-the-law compliance possible. First it was “pay or consent” subscriptions, which regulators hated. Now it’s “share everything or share less,” which they’re apparently accepting. But let’s be skeptical. Is a binary, all-or-nothing choice really what users want, or what the Digital Markets Act (DMA) intended? Probably not. It seems like Meta is just swapping one problematic framework for another that it can still control.
The Illusion of Choice
So what does “limited personalized advertising” even mean? That’s the billion-euro question Meta doesn’t have to answer clearly. The experience will likely be worse—showing you ads for lawnmowers when you live in an apartment—pushing you to just give up and consent to full tracking. It’s a classic “dark pattern” setup: make the privacy-respecting path intentionally inferior. And Meta’s statement is a masterclass in deflection. Sure, personalized ads generate economic activity. But that’s not the argument. The argument is about user autonomy and consent. By pivoting to jobs and the economy, they’re trying to reframe a privacy issue as an economic one. Clever, but pretty transparent.
What Happens Next?
I think we’ll see a repeat of the subscription flop. Very few people opted to pay. Will many more opt for a degraded, poorly-targeted ad experience? Doubtful. Most users will likely just click “accept” on the full data sharing option because it’s the path of least resistance. For Meta, that’s probably the ideal outcome. They can tell regulators, “Look, we gave them a choice!” while the data firehose remains largely unchanged. The real test will be how the European Commission enforces this. If they just accept this binary setup as the final solution, then the DMA’s teeth might be less sharp than we hoped. But if they see low uptake on the limited-ad option and come back with more fines, the dance continues. Basically, don’t expect your feed to change much in January.
