NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system (www.bitsoffreedom.nl)

A Dutch court has ordered Meta to respect users’ choice of recommendation system — effectively requiring the platform to honor when users opt out of a particular algorithmic feed rather than forcing its preferred recommendation pipeline. The ruling targets platform control over personalization and consented data processing, treating the selection of a recommender as a user preference that must be enforced, not overridden. This is significant because it creates a legal precedent that algorithmic curation is subject to individual choice and oversight, not just platform product design. For AI/ML practitioners and product teams this raises concrete technical and operational implications: platforms may need to maintain parallel recommendation pipelines (e.g., personalized vs. non-personalized or chronological), propagate and enforce consent/choice flags across inference systems, and ensure model isolation so one pipeline’s signals don’t leak into another. It also heightens requirements for auditability, logging and explainability around how choices affect content ranking, and could drive work on low-data or privacy-preserving recommenders, clearer evaluation metrics for alternative feeds, and runtime mechanisms to guarantee compliance without degrading performance. In short, the decision pushes recommender systems toward architectures that respect user-directed policy and provenance as first-class engineering constraints.