The EU’s Data Protection Board (EDPB) has told large online platforms they should not offer users a binary choice between paying for a service and consenting to their personal data being used to provide targeted advertising.
In October last year, the social media giant said it would be possible to pay Meta to stop Instagram or Facebook feeds of personalized ads and prevent it from using personal data for marketing for users in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland. Meta then announced a subscription model of €9.99/month on the web or €12.99/month on iOS and Android for users who did not want their personal data used for targeted advertising.
At the time, Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb, said: “EU law requires that consent is the genuine free will of the user. Contrary to this law, Meta charges a ‘privacy fee’ of up to €250 per year if anyone dares to exercise their fundamental right to data protection.”
Very interesting. Lots of news websites are operating on a very similar principle, with the user having to either accept all cookies or pay for an expensive subscription that allows them to opt out of tracking cookies. I’ve always thought that this couldn’t possibly be legal.
Stop telling these companies. Send them a fine, and cease and desist. That’s is. They know, they don’t care. Just charge them until they comply
Too bad that i left its platforms due to it.
That said, i dont expect this to be their last exploit of user rights.
Its actually fairly fast reaction from EU considering they ok introduced their pay or ok model in November.
I dont believe that paying really was a viable option anyway, as they set the price so high but it could be interesting to see how many actually chose to pay!
I was close to it. I’m an advocate for paying for services I use. We’re way too used to getting everything for free and we should be willing to pay for services we appreciate.
Which made me realise that Facebook especially I don’t appreciate. So I quit instead. It had value to me once but those times are long gone.
What bugged me and ultimately drove me to leave Instagram was the wording. In the prompt, they said something along the lines of “we will not use your data for advertising”. And I thought, wtf, I don’t want you to collect my data in the first place.
I read it as “no, we won’t use your data for advertising, but collect it anyways. If you ever dare to stop paying, we’ll retroactively process this data, too”
It had value to me too. I lost a lot of my online social life due to it. I honestly also considered paying but not the ridiculously high price that they were asking. Further more, paying would not stop them from tracking me and it would still have them show me recommended content. Its only the actual ads that you get rid of, but you’d still be seeing recommended commercial content from pages that META thinks suit your purchasing pattern.
I was close to it. I’m an advocate for paying for services I use.
Agreed.
We’re way too used to getting everything for free and we should be willing to pay for services we appreciate.
I’d argue that this is partly due to the continued decrease in real wealth experienced by a large amount of the population. Companies want to keep making more profits when people have less relative wealth. So, the data harvesting is making up for that, making it just that much worse for the lot of us.
I mean tracking exists because advertisers pay more for targeted ads, based on the tracking. I’d rather prefer it if the EU just made tracking illegal. Deal with the problem at its root.
Also maybe ban ads that track clicking on them (to then give a bigger payout). Advertisers should pay for simply showing me the ad and putting their brand/product in my brain.
And if we remove the option for targeted ads based on user tracking, the price for plain and simple old school ads might rise again, which is a very good thing for websites and users.
We have to be real here, that nobody has ever really consented to being tracked in the way these giant sites do it. Nobody has looked at that form and gone “I’m perfectly OK with 1698 different advertising agencies knowing my real name and interests, every time I’m online”
They go “yeah, whatever, get that popup the fuck out of my face so I can read this fascinating article about some 19 year-old pop star’s boob job”.
Part of it should be legislation. Another part should be browsers rendering fingerprinting to be completely ineffective.
Until a court rules in favour of this no one will budge as this is just an opinion. I do hope it comes to that as since Spain ruled that charging for not planting cookies was a okay browsing news sites has been miserable.
