In a major move addressing European regulations, Meta will soon give users in the EU, EEA, and Switzerland significantly more control over how their data is used across Facebook and Instagram. The changes, set to begin rolling out in the coming weeks, aim to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Omer Dursun at NeoWin
You’ll be able to unlink Facebook’s various services – such as Instagram and Facebook’s main social network thing – and you’ll be able to use Facebook Messenger as a standalone service without needing to have a Facebook account. Sadly, there’s no word on WhatsApp.
This only applies to people in the EU/EEA. Americans need not apply.
What word on WhatsApp? Do we need to have Facebook accounts to use WhatsApp?
I have no facebook account and use whatsapp
Maybe meaning the news that Whatsapp was going to allow interoperability with third party IM?
But, tell me this, how do they know I’m American, living in the united states? All of my information is set to Europe… I have a few friends in Europe, but yes most of them are in the US and any reasonable examination of my activity would be obvious that I’m not in Europe. But if they just go by address given in facebook, I should be ok. Right? I also don’t have any photos of myself with geographic identifiers, last images were posted years ago. Fingers crossed…
Bill Shooter of Bul,
This is a really good question and I’m curious how it will work too. With apple and google, they can just sell different product SKUs to different markets in order to comply with the EU while not giving up control over users in other markets. But an internet platform like facebook it may be harder to differentiate consumers – how will they determine which users are given rights under the EU?
Heuristically, they have access to plenty of clues, like IP address and phone numbers.
If a user uses a VPN and/or foreign sim card, does this impact their EU rights status? Obviously people travel, does this impact their status? If so, what is the time frame that facebook will look at?
Some services, like banking, require government ID, which is something facebook could technically do for proof, but users may find this to be a high bar to use facebook and have their rights under the EU.