Meta to offer ad choices for Facebook, Instagram users: EU

Meta will let Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union choose between sharing all their personal data for fully personalized ads or sharing less data for more limited personalization, the European Commission said.

The move brings Meta in line with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which sets new rules for major tech platforms.

Starting January 2026, EU users will be presented with options to decide how much of their data is used for ad personalization, but there is no full opt-out from all targeted ads.

The European Commission had warned Meta in June about possible daily fines after the company offered only limited changes to its pay-or-consent ad consent model.

Meta was fined €200 million (US$217 million) in April for breaching the Digital Markets Act between November 2023 and November 2024.

🔗 Source: Reuters

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Meta’s ‘less data’ likely limits cross-service use in the EU

The European Commission has not said what “less data” means under Meta’s model. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) requires gatekeepers to avoid combining personal data across services without explicit user consent and to offer a less personalized alternative 1. Meta will likely curb Facebook and Instagram data linking for EU users who pick limited personalization.
Meta’s earlier “consent or pay” offer drew a €200 million fine for failing to provide a meaningful free option with less personalization 2. The Commission will “seek feedback and evidence on the impact and uptake” after January 2026 implementation 3. Officials held close dialogue, and the EU opened a competition case on WhatsApp access rules for AI providers 3 1.

EU adtech should ready privacy-first targeting

Over 90% of advertisers in Europe partner with retailers for performance campaigns, and on-site retail media ad spend rose 22.2% to over €10 billion in 2024 4. As Meta’s options shift in 2026, retail media networks (advertising platforms run by retailers using their own shopper data) with first-party purchase data (information collected directly from transactions) may pull budget.
IAB Europe issued guidance on contextual advertising (targeting based on the content of a page or app rather than personal data) 5 and updated its attention measurement guide (frameworks for assessing whether people notice and engage with ads) 6. Adtech firms can pair privacy-safe contextual engines with marketing mix modeling (statistical analysis that uses aggregated data to attribute sales to channels) and apply IAB Europe’s guide on measuring incrementality in retail media (methods to quantify the causal lift attributable to ads) 7 as cross-platform data use faces stricter limits under the DMA.