CJEU C-252/21 Meta Platforms: Legal Bases Regime and Abuse of Dominant Position

Context of the Meta Platforms Judgment (C-252/21)

In its landmark ruling of 4 July 2023 (Meta Platforms and Others v Bundeskartellamt, C-252/21, ECLI:EU:C:2023:537), the CJEU clarified the intersection between competition law and the GDPR, as well as the strict limits governing legal bases for personalized advertising on social networks.

The Court held that a national competition authority may, in the exercise of its powers, find that a company's data processing operations fail to comply with the GDPR in order to establish an abuse of a dominant position under Article 102 TFEU.

Legal Bases and Processing of Sensitive Data (Articles 6 & 9)

The CJEU laid down decisive limits regarding the legal bases available to dominant digital platforms:

• Performance of a contract (Art. 6.1.b): Content and advertising personalization is not objectively indispensable to the provision of the main social network service and therefore cannot be grounded on contractual necessity;
• Legitimate interest (Art. 6.1.f): Cannot justify the massive cross-tracking and profiling of off-platform browsing behavior without consent, in light of data subjects' reasonable expectations and power asymmetries;
• Regime of special categories of data (Art. 9): Inferring sensitive information (political opinions, health, sexual orientation) from web browsing behavior falls under the prohibition of Article 9(1). While Article 9(2) sets out 10 exhaustive statutory exceptions (Art. 9.2.a to 9.2.j), Meta could not rely on the manifestly made public exemption (Art. 9.2.e) for mere passive browsing of third-party websites without explicit consent (Art. 9.2.a).

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See Also in the Legal Framework