The latest report from Caixin News Agency on December 10th stated that European regulatory agencies have requested Google to provide more information about its secret advertising cooperation with the Meta platform, as the agency believes that this partnership circumvents Google's own regulations on how to treat minors.
According to sources familiar with the situation, officials from the European Commission have been investigating "how Google helped Meta carry out a secret marketing project" and have sent compiled information to the regulatory agency.
Since October last year, regulatory agencies of the European Commission have required lawyers from Google's parent company Alphabet to review and organize data, presentations, internal chats, and emails related to advertising campaigns, and have named the materials collected during Google's internal investigation "Orange Owl".
Secret agreement
In August of this year, there were reports revealing this secret cooperation agreement. It is reported that under this agreement, Meta's Instagram ads are targeted towards teenagers aged 13 to 17 on Google's YouTube, cleverly avoiding Google's strict restrictions on minors' online behavior.
Meta selectively targets users who are marked as "unknown" in Google's advertising system, and in fact, Google is aware that the vast majority of these users belong to the category of minors.
Both companies originally planned to promote this model to more Meta applications, such as Facebook, and planned to expand the market to a global scale. However, after the secret agreement was exposed, Google immediately launched an internal investigation. According to a source familiar with the matter, the controversial project has been forced to terminate due to public opinion pressure and compliance risks.
Obviously, this measure blatantly violates Google's rules prohibiting personalized advertising to minors, including advertising targeting based on demographic information such as age and gender. Ironically, Google's policy emphasizes that its set guidelines cannot be bypassed in any way, even through so-called 'proxy targeting'.
Earlier this year, Meta also launched privacy and parental control policies for Instagram users under the age of 18, a major reform aimed at addressing people's growing concerns about the negative impact of social media.