Meta relents to EU, allows unlinking of Facebook and Instagram accounts

New standalone Messenger, Marketplace, and Gaming apps coming to the EU, too.

Meta will allow some Facebook and Instagram users to unlink their accounts as part of the platform's efforts to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) ahead of enforcement starting March 1.

In a blog, Meta's competition and regulatory director, Tim Lamb, wrote that Instagram and Facebook users in the EU, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland would be notified in the "next few weeks" about "more choices about how they can use" Meta's services and features, including new opportunities to limit data-sharing across apps and services.

Most significantly, users can choose to either keep their accounts linked or "manage their Instagram and Facebook accounts separately so that their information is no longer used across accounts." Up to this point, linking user accounts had provided Meta with more data to more effectively target ads to more users. The perk of accessing data on Instagram's widening younger user base, TechCrunch noted, was arguably the $1 billion selling point explaining why Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012.

Also announced today, users protected by the DMA will soon be able to separate their Facebook Messenger, Marketplace, and Gaming accounts. However, doing so will limit some social features available in some of the standalone apps.

While Messenger users choosing to disconnect the chat service from their Facebook accounts will still "be able to use Messenger’s core service offering such as private messaging and chat, voice and video calling," Marketplace users making that same choice will have to email sellers and buyers, rather than using Facebook's messenger service. And unlinked Gaming app users will only be able to play single-player games, severing their access to social gaming otherwise supported by linking the Gaming service to their Facebook social networks.

While Meta may have had choices other than depriving users unlinking accounts of some features, Meta didn't really have a choice in allowing newly announced options to unlink accounts. The DMA specifically requires that very large platforms designated as "gatekeepers" give users the "specific choice" of opting out of sharing personal data across a platform's different core services or across any separate services that the gatekeepers manage.

Without gaining "specific" consent, gatekeepers will no longer be allowed to "combine personal data from the relevant core platform service with personal data from any further core platform services" or "cross-use personal data from the relevant core platform service in other services provided separately by the gatekeeper," the DMA says. The "specific" requirement is designed to block platforms from securing consent at sign-up, then hoovering up as much personal data as possible as new services are added in an endless pursuit of advertising growth.

As defined under the General Data Protection Regulation, the EU requiring "specific" consent stops platforms from gaining user consent for broadly defined data processing by instead establishing "the need for granularity," so that platforms always seek consent for each "specific" data "processing purpose."

"This is an important 'safeguard against the gradual widening or blurring of purposes for which data is processed, after a data subject has agreed to the initial collection of the data,'” the European Data Protection Supervisor explained in public comments describing "commercial surveillance and data security practices that harm consumers" provided at the request of the FTC in 2022.

According to Meta's help page, once users opt out of sharing data between apps and services, Meta will "stop combining your info across these accounts" within 15 days "after you've removed them." However, all "previously combined info would remain combined."

Do new options comply with the DMA?

Lamb wrote in Meta's announcement that Meta is "committed to continue working hard to ensure that Meta’s products in the EU comply with the DMA and deliver value to people." He said that Meta had dedicated "significant resources" to compliance and "assembled a large cross-functional team staffed by senior employees from around the globe and across our entire family of apps to achieve" compliance.

But not everybody agrees that Meta's recent changes in the EU are really giving users the ability to "freely choose to opt-in" to data processing "by offering a less personalized but equivalent alternative" without "making the use of the core platform service or certain functionalities thereof conditional upon the end user’s consent."

For example, when Meta started giving EU users an ad-free subscription option for Facebook and Instagram, this was supposed to serve as a "less personalized but equivalent alternative" to opting in to ad-targeting required by the DMA. Not everyone agreed that charging a subscription allowed users to "freely" choose whether or not to opt in to sharing data, though.

In a complaint filed in November, Europe's largest consumer group, the European Consumer Organization (BEUC), alleged that Meta's subscription fees for ad-free access are so unreasonably high that they breach laws designed to protect user privacy as a fundamental right. That complaint came two days after another complaint filed with Austria's privacy watchdog by the privacy advocacy group NOYB accused Meta of "trying to extort supposed consent from its users with a 'yes or pay' choice."

The most recent changes today may also trigger scrutiny, raising questions of whether users are "freely" choosing to opt in to sharing data when faced with losing appealing features, like inviting friends to play a game or communicating with Marketplace buyers or sellers directly on the platform. TechCrunch warned that Meta could be risking EU regulators seeing today's announced options for EU users as "manipulating users into agreeing to their data being combined" by withholding potentially "attractive" functionality.

When Facebook acquired Instagram, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he considered the benefits of the acquisition to be "a combination of neutralizing a competitor and improving Facebook." At that time, according to internal company emails first reported by The Verge and reviewed during a congressional antitrust hearing probing the acquisition, Zuckerberg was concerned that "Instagram can hurt us meaningfully without becoming a huge business.”

Ultimately, Facebook convinced the US that the Instagram acquisition was not anticompetitive because Facebook did not compete directly with Instagram. But now, the DMA's stricter terms—designed to enhance competition between platforms operating in the EU—seems to suggest that Congress was thinking about competition all wrong in 2020. The US failed to see that the acquisition instantly multiplied the number of users that Facebook could target with advertising, The Verge noted in 2020, serving Facebook's actual goal of acquiring Instagram—dominating online advertising markets, not the market for camera apps.

It seems clear that enforcing the DMA will require EU regulators to tangle with emerging questions of whether platforms have done enough to comply. With fines up to 10 percent of a company's total worldwide turnover—which can go up to 20 percent "in case of repeated infringement"—Meta, for now, appears willing to gamble on its own definitions for requirements of "freely given" and "specific" consent.