A Spanish court has ordered Meta to pay €479 million to 87 Spanish digital publishers and news agencies for gaining an advertising edge by breaking EU data-protection rules.
The ruling, issued by Madrid’s Commercial Court No. 15, concludes that Facebook and Instagram benefited from Meta’s unlawful use of protected personal data.
That usage, according to the judge, gave the company an unfair advantage over Spanish media outlets competing for online advertising.
Publishers had been seeking €551 million, but the court settled on the lower figure after partially upholding their arguments, which were first reported by the Efe news agency.
How Meta crossed the line
At the centre of the case is Article 15.1 of Spain’s Unfair Competition Law, which considers it unfair to profit in the market through the breach of other laws, in this case, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
According to the General Council of the Judiciary, when the GDPR came into force in 2018 Meta quietly switched its legal basis for handling user data.
Instead of relying on explicit user consent, it claimed that processing the data was needed to ‘perform a contract’.
That shift mattered, because the legal basis determines whether a company can process personal information lawfully.
If the grounds are wrong, the court found, then the behavioural advertising Meta builds on that data becomes unlawful, and the advantage it generates becomes unfair competition.
The publishers argued that Meta earned more than €5.281 billion during the five years in which the breach allegedly took place.
Meta, whose European base is in Ireland, did not provide its precise earnings, leading the judge to assume the real figure was likely higher.
The company has already been fined in Ireland for GDPR violations and is facing a similar case in France.
Political reaction
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, said Meta executives will be called before Congress to explain why the company tracked users’ mobile browsing without permission, in what he described as potentially ‘systematic and massive’ spying.
Following the court’s decision, Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz issued a sharp warning: ‘No company, no matter how big, is above the law.’
She added that US tech giants ‘are not above our sovereignty’ and called for a stronger European tech model that protects both rights and the economy.
