Meta was also ordered to pay 98,500 dollars a day over user privacy breach.

Norway’s data protection authority Datatilsynet has imposed a temporary ban on Meta carrying out behavioral advertising based on the surveillance and profiling of users in the country. 

The ban, which will apply until October, will not allow Meta to harvest user information such as physical locations for showing targeted ads on its social media Facebook and photo/video sharing app Instagram.

Datatilsynet has also fined Meta one million krone, or 98,500 US dollars, a day over privacy breaches, starting 14 August, for failure to address this issue. The fine would run until 3 November 2023.

The regulator is also considering to refer its decision to the European Data Protection Board in order to widen the decision’s territorial scope to the rest of Europe.

Meta promised earlier to ask users in the European Union for their consent before allowing businesses to target advertising based on what they view on its services such as Facebook and Instagram, but Datatilsynet turned down this measure as “insufficient,” demanding Mark Zuckerberg’s company to stop the processing of personal data immediately and until a consent mechanism was up and running.

In 2021, Datatilsynet took down its Facebook page over Meta’s failure to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.