The competition authority said the company could no longer combine data from different sources without explicit permission from users.
Germany’s competition authority has ruled that Facebook cannot gather personal data across platforms and websites unless users give permission from each individual site, a decision that could have wide-ranging implications on the company’s ability to target advertising.
“In future, Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts,” Andreas Mundt, president of the Federal Cartel Office, said in a statement on Thursday.
“The combination of data sources substantially contributed to the fact that Facebook was able to build a unique database for each individual user and thus to gain market power.”
Facebook said it disagreed with the ruling and that German authorities had underestimated the competition the company faced in the country.
