Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, arrives for the Inaugural AI Insight Forum in Russell Building on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023. Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Meta’s privacy practices are being attacked on a dizzying variety of fronts here in Europe.
After the EU’s top court earlier this year sank Meta’s legal justifications for targeted advertising—which, for this company, is as essential as breathing—Meta abruptly made its EU users decide between paying over $10 a month to use Facebook and Instagram, and consenting to receive tracking-based ads.
Privacy advocates were the first to attack last week, complaining to the Austrian data protection authority about this “privacy fee” and arguing that the consent people were giving was coerced, and therefore illegal. Consumer advocates joined the fray two days later, complaining to consumer protection authorities that Meta was “breaching EU consumer law by using unfair, deceptive and aggressive practices, including partially blocking consumers from using the services to force them to take a decision quickly, and providing misleading and incomplete information in the process.”
And now we can add a competition suit to the list, courtesy of Big Spanish Media.
The AMI newspaper association today revealed a €550 million ($598 million) lawsuit against Meta, arguing that the U.S. firm gained an unfair competitive advantage in the ad space by systematically breaking EU data protection law. As AMI president José Joly tells it, Meta’s indifference towards user consent threatens the media’s survival, and therefore democracy itself.
Spain’s media giants have form when it comes to successfully taking on Big Tech. Nearly a decade ago, they lobbied their government into passing a very restrictive ancillary copyright law that led Google to shut down Google News in the country for eight years—Google reopened the service last year following a legal reform that allowed for negotiations with publishers, as opposed to the mandatory payments that the law previously demanded.
So, that’s privacy law, consumer law, and competition law—is there any other angle from which Meta’s consent issue can possibly be attacked? National security? Food standards? Jokes aside, this legal smorgasbord neatly indicates how many aspects of our lives—and our rights—the online surveillance industry touches.
Separately, Meta and Harvard have been hit with a whistleblower disclosure from the prominent disinformation researcher Joan Donovan, who alleges her team at Harvard Kennedy School was shut down due to inappropriate influence from the company.
Donovan says the school axed the fully funded Technology and Social Change Research Project (TASC) and let her go after two years of trying to “silence” the team’s findings—all of which she links to the school’s relationship with Meta, and a $500 million pledge for Harvard’s AI institute from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Harvard Kennedy School strongly denied the allegations in comments to the Washington Post, insisting that “donors have no influence” over research there. I asked Meta for comment on this story and the Spanish suit but had received none by the time of publication. More news below.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
Spotify cuts. Spotify is the latest tech firm to announce job cuts, this time in the order of more than 1,500 roles. As the Guardian reports, that’s 17% of the Swedish streamer’s workforce. As usual, rising interest rates are to blame. CEO Daniel Ek: “Despite our efforts to reduce costs this past year, our cost structure for where we need to be is still too big.”
OpenAI store delay. OpenAI was set to this year allow developers to distribute their “custom GPT” ChatGPT versions through a marketplace, but Axios reports that the move is now delayed to early next year, because of the recent leadership chaos. Custom GPTs can already be shared via a link.
Google AI delay. Meanwhile, Google is reportedly delaying the launch of its Gemini large language model, which was supposed to take place next week. Per The Information, Google’s next-gen AI model isn’t great at handling “some non-English queries.”
ON OUR FEED
“I am going to get to the bottom of who is responsible.”
—Judge James Donato, boiling over at what he sees as Google’s systematic suppression of evidence in the Epic Games v. Google trial. He said he would let the jury in this case make up its own mind about whether Google deliberately destroyed evidence, but then “pursue these issues on my own, outside of this trial, in subsequent trials.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Sam Altman sheds light on feud with Elon Musk: ‘The closer people are to being pointed in the same direction, the more contentious the disagreements are’, by Steve Mollman
Amazon’s big bet on Anthropic looks even more important after the OpenAI drama, by Geoff Colvin and Kylie Robison
Amazon will now pay Elon Musk’s SpaceX to get its Project Kuiper satellites into space—and compete against his Starlink service, by Steve Mollman
The rise of Joshua Kushner: How the young VC quietly built a $5.3 billion firm, Thrive Capital, by Alyson Shontell
Apple TV+ and Paramount+ are considering bundling their streaming services as media companies seek answers to streaming profitability, by Paolo Confino
‘We cannot let China get these chips’: Commerce Secretary Raimondo says more funding needed for AI export controls, by Bloomberg
BEFORE YOU GO
Artemis 3 delay. One more piece of delay news! NASA’s return to the Moon is certainly a long time coming, with more than half a century having already passed since the last manned landing, but now it’s likely to be even longer than planned.
As reported by Gizmodo, the U.S. government has admitted the Artemis 3 mission could be postponed from 2025 to 2027 if certain challenges aren’t dealt with—namely, launch partner SpaceX’s delays in the development of Starship, and design challenges around the Artemis 3 moonsuits, which are being developed by Axiom Space.
