> Does anybody believe you can use this "one cool trick" to circumvent EU privacy laws?
At least most of the German and French media industries do, and they've been getting away with doing the exact same pay-or-consent thing for years. So it's easy to see why Meta would think it'll work for them as well.
(I think Meta will lose this, but it'll be a good test for whether the laws really are the same for everyone.)
> What if a privacy subscription costs $1000/mo?
That's a weak argument, because it implies that there is a price at which this is OK. I.e. there's no actual principle at stake and we're just haggling about the price.
And if it comes to some price being ok, Meta isn't trying to charge $1k/month like in your thought experiment, but an amount pretty close to what a typical Facebook user in Europe produces in ad revenue. Trying to argue that pricing that just matches e.g. the 80th percentile user is unreasonable seems like a loser.
While I’m all for privacy, I don’t see why people should not pay for using their apps. Running a platform costs tons of money. Any operator has to make their income from somewhere. In case of FB, it’s through displaying ads; or paying a fee. One can argue the fee is too high and request a reduction. Or quits using the app. The choice always exist. But nothing in this world is free.
Social networking as a fundamental human right? I find the idea ludicrous, but if, then request the governments to build and operate them.
The issue isn’t that Meta is asking for money, but that they’re asking for it in exchange for taking away a right, in a way that is against the law.
And the price they’re asking for is deliberately exorbitant so people will never choose it. Do you truly not see the end game?
It’s like Meta opened a restaurant where they serve food for free and popularised it to the point some families only see each other over those meals. A few years after they hooked everyone we found out they lace the food with drugs, so we make a law saying you can’t do that without consent. To which Meta’s reaction is to introduce a new plan where they will serve you food with fewer drugs in exchange for beating the crap out of you every time you come in.
You have the right to not be served foods with drugs and to not be beaten down. If Meta can’t operate a restaurant without doing either and sustain a business, that is their failure.
It boggles the mind that people defend corporations who exploit their users, giving them a pass to do anything as long as they throw some rancid peanuts on the ground for free.
Nobody, absolutely nobody said that ever. So the question is why are you asking that question? No, social networks are not a fundamental right. Privacy is. What is so hard to understand about that?
We sadly already created a world where people wants to pay for nothing, and is more or less roped into one subscription after another.
It's not unreasonable for Meta/Facebook to ask for a subscription, if you don't want to be tracked, not that I'd trust them not to. The current fee is set either to avoid having people signup or because settings it at say cost + 10% would reveal that their ads actually doesn't generate that much profit. Meta makes a lot of money on Facebook, but only because of their scale. Individually each European user represents somewhere around €20 per year, ten times less than what Meta is asking. So for €25 you should get not only no tracking, you should get ad-free Facebook.
Meta will never tell us, but how much less would a user be worth without all the tracking?
Nobody said that. Now, you want to create a fundamental companies right to do whatever they want for revenue. They can't, they'll be shutdown one day, hopefully
Honestly the problem isn't the money. Corporations even offering that choice is an indignity unto itself. Personal information is not currency to pay for services with. There should be no tracking whatsoever whether they pay for the service or not. If they can't run a free service, then they should charge everyone money and compete on a fair marketplace without taking advantage of the scale and reach of a "free" service.
Why charge consumers for products/services when we can charge them for not invading their privacy instead. It seems Meta's free "products" are only worth paying for in order to avoid their ill effects. No wonder they are not sold on the free market. (Zuckerberg once assured people something like "Facebook will always be free". Translation: We know we cannot sell Facebook as a product, no one would pay.)
One wonders if payment can even bind Facebook to refrain from tracking. How is compliance with the terms of this "agreement" monitored. How does anyone even know that Facebook is not still tracking, perhaps through another entity. And of course, Facebook could change the terms anytime. It has a record of ratcheting up the surveilance and ads with further anti-privacy changes.
Facebook tracks people who are not even Facebook users.
Apple CEO claims "privacy is a fundamental human right". Is this just more deceptive marketing. Apple must have some employees living in Europe who use Facebook. What's stopping these "data subjects" from filing complaints against Facebook. That's a question left to the reader.
And obviously they need to know what kind of targeted ads to show you once you decide to stop paying, so the tracking will continue irregardless of any ongoing payment.
Probably there is more: It is also useful to show ads to non-paying friends, valuable to sell to data brokers, and made available to 3-letter agencies.
For an analysis of the graph between users, does a link between two users break when one is paying or both? Don't they even track graphs beyond non-user, e.g., same non-user phone number in two user address books?
Nothing in GDPR gives you legal basis for that (the penalties under GDPR are paid to the state). But there isn't anything that prevents you to sue them either, so you just need to find another legal basis (like, to prove a damage) and convince the civil court. Civil courts have famously low standard (preponderance of evidence), so it doesn't sound easy, but it doesn't sound hard either.
News outlets based in Europe routinely pull this cookie wall crap. I guess they get a pass for very very principled reasons and not just because they are based in Europe whereas Facebook isn't... /s
Banging Facebook over the head might make Facebook suffer, but it isn't going to create an alternative privacy-conscious social network, or even the incentives to the existence of such an alternative. It's just going to further add cost to a bunch of properties that might have once been dominant and hegemonic, but aren't anymore (hello tiktok) and destroy value that would otherwise have accrued, primarily, to advertisers whose ads now will be much more crappily targeted.
The reason is that they are smaller and if you want to make an example to scare an industry into compliance it's better to go after big companies first. If Facebook gets dragged over the coals the smaller ones are next unless they adapt. This myth that only non-EU companies get pulled into court is nothing but propaganda, mostly spread by the poor, poor, US-based violators of privacy.
> The reason is that they are smaller and if you want to make an example to scare an industry into compliance it's better to go after big companies first.
They've had like five years of large European media companies doing this. That was the time to make an example out of someone, not hope that some even bigger company comes along.
I'm sure there's plenty of local enforcement, I'm just talking about my own cookie wall experience which is mostly happening when consuming Europe-based news outlets. I was really surprised to see that it was enabled by some national agencies which have explicitly okayed the cookie wall for such cases.
Since I got this pop-up I stopped using Facebook. I doubt that this will make a dent in their statistics, but I will still manifest my opposition to their action in the only way I have available to me.
Personally, I would not have a problem with paying for Facebook or Instagram without them abusing my personal data. But the 10€ they are charging is a ridiculous amount that is intended to drive users into opting to have their data used.
I doubt that Meta makes anywhere near 10€ per months with the ads they are showing me. If they can show realistic numbers how much money they own by showing me ads, I am absolutely fine to pay that with a 10% surcharge. I doubt this will be more than 5€ per month.
It was clear this was coming and noyb always seems to be very well prepared for their cases. I'm curious about the outcome.
I'm happy that the GDPR already forced Facebook to offer a no-personalized-ads option, even though I don't really trust them that they don't keep collecting your data for when you cancel the subscription.
I think there's a difficult balance to strike, but paying for not violating your privacy is not. I wish them luck!
With search engines, I get actual value from them knowing what I like — e.g. "mouse" should give me the peripheral not the mammal, and the default YouTube home page if I'm not logged in is 99% irrelevant (sports and music, I don't care about either).
Advert tracking, and anything where they sell on this data, that's where their interests are no longer aligned with mine.
Readit News
FB is basically daring Europe to enforce their laws. I hope the entire concept of paying for privacy gets shut down hard.
At least most of the German and French media industries do, and they've been getting away with doing the exact same pay-or-consent thing for years. So it's easy to see why Meta would think it'll work for them as well.
(I think Meta will lose this, but it'll be a good test for whether the laws really are the same for everyone.)
> What if a privacy subscription costs $1000/mo?
That's a weak argument, because it implies that there is a price at which this is OK. I.e. there's no actual principle at stake and we're just haggling about the price.
And if it comes to some price being ok, Meta isn't trying to charge $1k/month like in your thought experiment, but an amount pretty close to what a typical Facebook user in Europe produces in ad revenue. Trying to argue that pricing that just matches e.g. the 80th percentile user is unreasonable seems like a loser.
And they are wrong there too.
This is not a "Pay or see ads" issue, this is a "pay or consent" issue.
It implied the opposite to me.
Social networking as a fundamental human right? I find the idea ludicrous, but if, then request the governments to build and operate them.
And the price they’re asking for is deliberately exorbitant so people will never choose it. Do you truly not see the end game?
It’s like Meta opened a restaurant where they serve food for free and popularised it to the point some families only see each other over those meals. A few years after they hooked everyone we found out they lace the food with drugs, so we make a law saying you can’t do that without consent. To which Meta’s reaction is to introduce a new plan where they will serve you food with fewer drugs in exchange for beating the crap out of you every time you come in.
You have the right to not be served foods with drugs and to not be beaten down. If Meta can’t operate a restaurant without doing either and sustain a business, that is their failure.
It boggles the mind that people defend corporations who exploit their users, giving them a pass to do anything as long as they throw some rancid peanuts on the ground for free.
One can display ads without tracking/profiling someone.
Facebook can show all the ads they like, and have a "pay to not see them" option too.
Nobody, absolutely nobody said that ever. So the question is why are you asking that question? No, social networks are not a fundamental right. Privacy is. What is so hard to understand about that?
It's not unreasonable for Meta/Facebook to ask for a subscription, if you don't want to be tracked, not that I'd trust them not to. The current fee is set either to avoid having people signup or because settings it at say cost + 10% would reveal that their ads actually doesn't generate that much profit. Meta makes a lot of money on Facebook, but only because of their scale. Individually each European user represents somewhere around €20 per year, ten times less than what Meta is asking. So for €25 you should get not only no tracking, you should get ad-free Facebook.
Meta will never tell us, but how much less would a user be worth without all the tracking?
Nobody said that. Now, you want to create a fundamental companies right to do whatever they want for revenue. They can't, they'll be shutdown one day, hopefully
One wonders if payment can even bind Facebook to refrain from tracking. How is compliance with the terms of this "agreement" monitored. How does anyone even know that Facebook is not still tracking, perhaps through another entity. And of course, Facebook could change the terms anytime. It has a record of ratcheting up the surveilance and ads with further anti-privacy changes.
Facebook tracks people who are not even Facebook users.
Apple CEO claims "privacy is a fundamental human right". Is this just more deceptive marketing. Apple must have some employees living in Europe who use Facebook. What's stopping these "data subjects" from filing complaints against Facebook. That's a question left to the reader.
Kudos to Noyb. Amazing work.
For an analysis of the graph between users, does a link between two users break when one is paying or both? Don't they even track graphs beyond non-user, e.g., same non-user phone number in two user address books?
Banging Facebook over the head might make Facebook suffer, but it isn't going to create an alternative privacy-conscious social network, or even the incentives to the existence of such an alternative. It's just going to further add cost to a bunch of properties that might have once been dominant and hegemonic, but aren't anymore (hello tiktok) and destroy value that would otherwise have accrued, primarily, to advertisers whose ads now will be much more crappily targeted.
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ has a list of enforcement actions, and low and behold, most of them are against EU companies.
(The country filter is for the fining entity, not the fined entity, just in case anyone thinks this doesn't include US companies at all)
They've had like five years of large European media companies doing this. That was the time to make an example out of someone, not hope that some even bigger company comes along.
Actually going after the big players is way how to set precedent. If Facebook will be allowed to do this then most likely everybody can.
I doubt that Meta makes anywhere near 10€ per months with the ads they are showing me. If they can show realistic numbers how much money they own by showing me ads, I am absolutely fine to pay that with a 10% surcharge. I doubt this will be more than 5€ per month.
I'm happy that the GDPR already forced Facebook to offer a no-personalized-ads option, even though I don't really trust them that they don't keep collecting your data for when you cancel the subscription.
I think there's a difficult balance to strike, but paying for not violating your privacy is not. I wish them luck!
I would pay for YouTube premium in a heartbeat if it meant they will stop tracking me and stalking my activity.
Advert tracking, and anything where they sell on this data, that's where their interests are no longer aligned with mine.