Meta said it will use user location, language and data from Instagram and Facebook to tailor ads on WhatsApp.
On Monday (16 June), Meta announced that it will be rolling out ads on WhatsApp over the coming months. However, yesterday (19 June), the Irish Data Protection Commission told reporters that the company will be delaying the move in the EU until 2026.
“[The] new product won’t be launching [in] the EU market until 2026. We have been informed by WhatsApp and we will be meeting with them to discuss any issues further,” said DPC commissioner Des Hogan.
According to Hogan, the new advertising model will be discussed with other national data protection authorities.
However, a spokesperson for WhatsApp told Politico that the ads are a global update, being rolled out gradually.
The new ads are set to appear in WhatsApp’s Updates tab, which is home to both Channels and Status features. For a monthly fee, users will be able to subscribe to Channels, for example a news network, for “exclusive updates”, Meta said.
Meta will also promote channels that it detects would be interesting to users. The company said that it will use “limited” information such as a user’s country, city, language, the channels they already follow and how they interact with ads to determine this.
Additionally, if users have enabled it, Meta will also use data from across their Meta-owned accounts, such as Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.
The announcement prompted a sharp response from data privacy advocacy group NOYB. The non-profit’s chairperson Max Schrems said that the company is doing “exactly the opposite of what EU law requires”.
“The data of its various platforms gets linked and users are tracked for advertising without any genuine choice.”
According to NOYB, not offering users the opportunity to “freely consent” to personalised advertising is “probably not legal” under GDPR.
Meta’s ‘pay or consent’ model, which, in essence, forces users to pay for an ad-free experience or consent to their data being used for advertising, was found to have breached the EU Digital Markets Act last year.
As a result, the company reduced its subscription fee for its ad-free model by 40pc and promised to offer non-paying EU users an experience with “less personalised ads”. Meta, however, said at the time that it remains “committed to personalised advertising”.
NOYB suspects that Meta will take a similar ‘pay or consent’ approach with WhatsApp ads.
Schrems said that the lack of enforcement of EU law is “painfully obvious”. He added that European regulators “urgently need to take clear action”.
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