Germany's Federal Cartel Office claims credit for Meta untying its virtual reality headsets from its social accounts, a change of direction the company announced back in August.
Despite winning this concession, the Bundeskartellamt isn't closing its investigation of its virtual reality offerings. It said today that it wants to keep an eye on how the tech giant presents account choice options to users of virtual reality headsets.
Data separation between Meta's social services and its virtual reality products is going to be a priority for the German regulators.
It seems to have been able to get a partial separation already.
Facebook hit with antitrust probe for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts
There is a separate challenge to Meta's so-called'superprofiling' of users, whereby the company pools usage data across different services and links it to a single user ID to flesh out ever more detailed profiles for ad targeting purposes
The European Union's top court could decide next year whether to unblocking the FCO's order or toss it.
As a result of the legal proceeding pending before the European Court of Justice, the extent to which data processing is permissible is a live discussion topic between the two parties.
The data of users with a separate Meta account will be kept separate from the data gathered from other Meta services.
In December 2020, the German competition watchdog opened a separate probe over Meta's plan to tie its virtual reality products with its social network, saying it was concerned that linking access to its virtual reality products with its social network could constitute a prohibited abuse.
The decision to roll out separate accounts for users of its virtual reality service came a few months after the FCO completed another proceeding to confirm that Meta is subject to a special competition abuse control regime. The designation was not appealed.
The Meta account allows users to use the Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets without being connected to the internet.
In the process of setting up the headsets users would have to be allowed to decide as freely and uninfluenced as possible whether to use the headsets separately or in connection with other Meta services.
The headsets are expected to be available in Germany soon.
A pan-European Union ex ante competition reform, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), will come into force across the bloc next year and will put up-front obligations on the most powerful internet giants.
The president of the FCO commented on the statement.
“The digital ecosystem created by Meta with a very large user base makes the company the key player in social media. Meta is also an important player in the growing VR market. Competition in these two sectors could be severely impeded if only Facebook or Instagram members were able to use the VR headsets. Meta has responded to our concerns and has offered to give users of Quest glasses the option to create a separate Meta account as a solution to the problem. While we welcome this development, we will not terminate the proceeding today. We will now continue to monitor the actual design of users’ options as well as issues regarding the combination and processing of user data from the various Meta services. This case shows that Section 19a of the German Competition Act (GWB), the new instrument to monitor large digital companies more effectively, allows us to efficiently address competition problems in practice.”
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