EU Hits Meta With $414M Fine, And 5 Stories You Might’ve Missed Over the Holidays
Welcome to the first edition of The Topic Tracker for 2023. If you’re new to The Topic Tracker, this is OpenWeb’s bi-weekly newsletter bringing media professionals highlights from the worlds of audience, publishing, community, safety, and more.
In this edition, we're diving into the EU's latest data-protection ruling on Meta, why ChatGPT has Google executives sounding the alarms, unexpected and consequential impacts of brand safety on Black-owned media, the latest tool healthcare advertisers are using to target consumers, and more.
Without further ado, let's get into it.
Privacy // EU Says Meta's Terms of Service Does Not Equal Consent
Yesterday, EU regulators delivered Meta a massive blow when it ruled their method for gaining user consent towards personalized ads violated GDPR.
Meta, like Google and countless retail media platforms and publishers, includes language about data collection for targeting purposes in its terms of service. Essentially, if a consumer wants to use the Meta platform, Meta's terms of service would require them to agree to personalized targeting. Now the EU has ruled this methodology doesn’t really give users much choice in how their data is used.
Much has been made about the Brussels Effect—how laws passed in the EU tend to affect tech companies worldwide. If so, websites, retail media platforms, and publishers may need to request permission to track and target users, even if it’s their own first-party data.
Read more at The New York Times.
Advertising // Google Frets Over ChatGPT’s Impact on its Search Engine Ad Sales
Google is more than a little worried over a new “disrupter” it helped fund and bring to life: ChatGPT. This newest chatbot can “serve up information in clear, simple sentences, rather than just a list of internet links.”
According to the New York Times, ChatGPT prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red.”
Why the fear? Chatbots have the potential to replace the need for online searches (and with it, the tens of billions in revenue that Google earns each quarter). Specifically, “If a chat bot is responding to queries with tight sentences, there is less reason for people to click on advertising links.”
Read more at The New York Times.
Journalism // TikTok Spies on Forbes Journalists
ByteDance, owner of TikTok, grew tired of journalists reporting on the platform’s ties to China—and decided to find out once and for all who was leaking company info to the press.
As part of that effort, TikTok employees began spying on journalists, including those who work for Forbes, “improperly gaining access to their IP addresses and user data in an attempt to identify whether they had been in the same locales as ByteDance employees.”
Ultimately, leadership at ByteDance requested an investigation, discovered the surveillance and fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led the team responsible for them. Lepitak’s boss then resigned.
Read more at Forbes.
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