BERLIN, Sept 20 — Facebook’s parent company Meta today suffered a setback in its challenge against German antitrust rules as a top adviser to the EU Court of Justice backed the regulator.
The German Federal Competition Authority had prohibited Meta from the data processing practice after finding that it constituted an abuse of the company’s dominant position on the social network market. Today, the EU court’s advocate general said that while the antitrust authority does not have the jurisdiction to rule on an infringement of data protection rules, compliance with such rules could be taken as an “important indicator” in ascertaining if an entity has breached competition rules.
In order for an exemption to the prohibition concerning such data to apply, the user “must be fully aware that, by an explicit act, he is making personal data public”.