Reports of Musk forcing tracking ads on Twitter put him on a costly collision course with EU privacy

[Eugene]

Source: TechCrunch

Reports of Musk forcing tracking ads on Twitter put him on a costly collision course with EU privacy laws

Natasha Lomas@riptari / 9:19 AM EST•December 14, 2022

Twitter’s lead privacy regulator in the European Union is being kept very busy indeed by Elon Musk’s erratic piloting of the bird site.

Following a report by Platformer, which suggests Musk is planning to force users to accept personalized advertising unless they pay for a subscription service that will include an opt-out for ads, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) told us it is reviewing the matter.

This adds to a growing pile of data protection concerns piling up on its desk — let’s call these the real ‘Twitter Files’ — such as Musk providing access to Twitter systems to non-staff reporters (um, security and privacy anyone?); the status of Twitter’s main establishment in Ireland (and, therefore, the streamlined situation it currently enjoys with the DPC leading oversight of its compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, aka the GDPR); and whether Twitter has adequate compliance staff and appropriate resources to deal with all the inbound enquiries from regulators and users (such as requests for deletion of data) since Musk took an axe to halve company headcount, to name a small portion of the regulatory chaos he’s kicked up in very short order.

Under the GDPR Twitter needs a valid legal basis to process personal data, such as tracking and profiling users to target them with ads.

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Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/14/elon-musk-twitter-forced-ads-europe/

[Timewas]

1. Glad

That I dumped it