1y ago

Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don't agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram

www.businessinsider.com Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don't agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram

Meta is considering offering ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram for $14 a month – but only in Europe.

Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don't agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram::Meta is considering offering ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram for $14 a month – but only in Europe.

TechNews @radiation.party

Meta wants to charge EU users $14/month if they don't agree to personalized ads

www.businessinsider.com /meta-charges-eu-users-for-ad-free-instagram-and-facebook-2023-10

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214 comments

I guess this is a fair indication then of how much Meta receives per person from advertisers...
- There is always a grift, I'd expect the charge to users to be probably 20-50% higher than the revenue from normal users.
  
  Add an extra 0 if reddit API stuff was any indication
  
  Yes. I think they are padding this to make it feel more punitive. This flips the bird to the regulatory body, and discourages people from switching. Frankly I’m surprised they didn’t make it higher.
- Your money will always be less valuable than your data.
  The amount is based on the threshold at which they believe most people will just accept the ad terms rather than pay. Thus it is slightly more than pretty much any other mainstream streaming or subscription service.
  
  Perversely; I'm always less inclined to buy a product that I've seen advertised... "Why do they need to advertise it? It can't be up to much." And "Part of the ticket price has gone into advertising, so it's not so valuable a thing.", usually being my first thoughts.
- Meta received about 4-5$ per user per month, so the Zuck is pulling everyone’s legs here.
  Edit: 3-4$.
  
  The users willing to pay are the most valuable users on the platform for advertisers because they are, let me consult my notes… willing to pay for things.
  The logical conclusion is you must charge more for users to not get ads than your average revenue per user from ads or you end up losing money because the quality of your non paying users has taken a nose dive.

This might be unpopular, but here goes nothing:
With the correct and fitting (and fair) regulations, oversight by the government and accountabilit, this is a correct and more ethical decision.
Stuff costs money. For now. Infrastructure, wages, repairs, fixes, improvements, new features.
All these things dont come free and we only pay nothing DIRECTLY, because we pay in data, attention and privacy violations.
By fixing this issue, the access to all these things can be secured without the plattform falling appart or having to resort to invasive data harvesting. We could even make these practices illegal, because plattforms would not just die then.
And no, the price should not be so high to generate profit for the executives. Thats why regulation is so important.
In the Modern Age we live in, Social Media is at this point akin to an essential service and should therefore be regulated as such: No profit, but stable maintenance and secure access free from monetary interest for everyone equally.
- Lots of people want SM to just fall off the face of the earth, but they forget that nothing close to it has ever existed in human history. It's completely new and there will be and have been mistakes, from giant to small. There's no going back, only forwards, we need to learn and regulate as needed.
  We learned that keeping it "free" for the end user leads to severe privacy implications as the service needs to make money not just for profit but just to keep things running and put out new features and fixes.
  At it's core, SM gives the smallest of us (For better or for worse) a voice to the level that in the past was achievable only for the rich and the noble and interconnects us all globally better than anything that has ever come before it.
  If we can learn to mitigate the bad parts I think SM will end up being a boon for humanity
  
  Its not new, its just a different platform. Pub, forum, market, square, plaza, community hall, water cooler. Humans are fundamentally social animals and there have always been public forums were the community gathers to meet, chat, and share news and gossip. Those physical places have essentially all been wiped out in modern western countries now as it let's all people in an area gather and share ideas. That's really bad for capitalism and for our increasingly fascist governments. So they close the pubs, run roads the the forums and close the markers to build a new Walmart. Social media is there now to provide for the need but to do it in a a way that divides people instead of bringing them together, and controls what they see and hear so they stay compliant.
- This is an insightful perspective and I agree in principle I think.
  the price should not be so high
  I think the $14 is actually egregious. Punitive even. The cost to facebook of providing content per user per month would be less than $1. Let's not forget that they can still earn revenue from these users, it's just the data profiling that's limited so their ads may be less efficient to some degree.
  Social Media is at this point akin to an essential service
  Yeah, access to facebook probably is an essential service. Particularly for people who are disadvantaged or impoverished. But, I do wish it wasn't so, and mandating that facebook provide access is the wrong approach IMO. I would rather see open, free-from-advertising platforms promoted.
  Imagine if every town or city had it's own lemmy & mastodon instances - not necessarily even federated. All your fb marketplace stuff, community and social groups happening there instead of facebook.
- People on the internet are too used to having everything for free. But then they also want no ads and trackers. Do they expect everything to be built by some slaves or by volunteers?
  I just don't get why this should be an unpopular opinion at all.
  p.s. I don't use Facebook. Or any other social media really.
  
  I expect some sods grandma (or even my own) to watch the ad on my behalf.
  
  Do they expect everything to be built by some slaves or by volunteers?
  I feel like those "I want FOSS for everything" people seriously thinks software devs are slaves who must fulfill their wishes at any time and if they happened to make money in some way or other, it's like they are the devils themselves.
  it doesn't matter if it's a company or one guy who purely spends his free time with a project.
- Would have been nice if they decided to give that option during the early days when they made the decision to start mining data and selling it off. I totally would have been up for a reasonable fee to keep my data felt bad for Julian from being sold.
  
  FB is struggling with an interesting problem. If you have enough early adopters, the rest of the population will follow. These things behave a bit like the critical mass in nuclear fission. Once you cross over a specific threshold, that’s when things start happening. In the early days of FB, it was all about growth and providing value to the users.
  Once they had enough users, they started selling user data to advertisers. At that point, most users weren’t particularly privacy aware, and you could argue that it still isn’t ja major concern for a most people who use platforms like Tweetook or Snapstgram. People here on Lemmy aren’t really a representative sample of the rest of the population.
  Providing a privacy friendly option wasn’t really that necessary back in those days. Providing a paid option might also hurt the ad sales, so that would have been a risky move. If only a certain part of the uses are subjected to data harvesting and ads, you’re essentially selling an inferior product to the advertisers. Sounds like a very risky move if the subscription becomes more popular.
  If that happens FB would have to cross that bridge quickly. Being in the middle is a very precarious position, because the way I see it, these options don’t really support each other.
- zuck's ego fueled endeavors cost money, actual services upkeep and development is a small fraction of it.
  this lizard already has insanely profitable business at hand, but it's hard to combine steady performance for shareholders and shit like metaverse at the same time, so he needs to milk users for even more money.
- It really is kind of crazy how angry people get now at the thought of paying for something they use daily.

Lol, thanks for helping convince all my relatives and friends to finally leave Facebook then, Facebook. Couldn't think of a better incentive myself.
- don't worry, they'll just agree to the profiling.
  
  At first I was like hell yeah finally the corrupt politicians in my country will end. Then I read your comment and saw the dry old boney finger clicking the blue button instead of the small text just to get the pop-up gone

So they're admitting regulations work. They are making a lot less money due to random ads instead of targeting ads so they will have to charge to be sure they are still making too much.
I can't wait for the next regulations against tech corporations and social media.
- They can't charge their REAL customers, the ad purchasers, as much without the ads being "targeted".
  $14 is unrealistic and will never be paid, but it means that it's an option... So I'm guessing that people will be able to "opt in" to a free version with targeted ads.. This whole thing is probably just a workaround.
- The funny part is that contextual ads are at least as effective as targeted ads. So not only is facebook violating your privacy. They are ripping of their customers at the same time.

Who would have thought that all those copy/pased chain posts from yesteryear were on to something:
IT IS OFFICIAL. IT WAS EVEN ON THE NEWS. FACEBOOK WILL START CHARGING DUE TO THE NEW PROFILE CHANGES. IF YOU COPY THIS ON YOUR WALL YOUR ICON WILL TURN BLUE AND FACEBOOK WILL BE FREE FOR YOU. PLEASE PASS THIS MESSAGE ON, IF NOT YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE DELETED IF YOU DO NOT PAY
- Thanks for reminding me why I left Facebook god knows how many years ago.
- What's amazing is that people still to this day repost that same dumb shit...
  
  Well, it has worked well until now! Smile

I have a much cheaper method of avoiding personalised ads on Facebook and Instagram.
STOP USING FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM.
- What's like FB that I can move my family to? Not mast. Not Lemmy. Actual long-form stories and embedded pics and stuff like FB or G+. It has to be normy Nana friendly, with no nerd bar to get over. Any recommendations?
  
  That's the exact problem. There are Twitter and Reddit clones which are much nicer but no Facebook clone.
  
  Same problem here, fortunately my FB feed is cleansed by uBlock Origin with custom scripts that block all the "suggestions for you" and other such bollocks as well as the ads. It's surprising how little content my family actually post, means I can drop in once a week and not miss anything.
- One more time for the people in the back 🗣️
- Russia just banned them

Please do it. It will die so fast
- Not really. The amount of people that are still on Facebook but care about data privacy should be negligible. The rest will just accept personalized ads.
  
  I doubt the EU would look kindly upon this. Allowing people to opt out of personalised ads is done for a good reason, and punishing people who opt out like this sounds like a very hostage-like "or else" kind of tactic.
  Should facebook go through with this, it will be interesting to see what happens.
  
  It's weird how people froth at the mouth and post "FACEBOOK DOES NOT HAVE MY PERMISSION TO SHARE PHOTOS OR MESSAGES" on their Facebook page every 3 weeks while clicking blindly on OK buttons agreeing to absolutely anything and everything that gets in the way of them seeing another banal "life hack".

Very X of you, facebook
- https://x.org

Go for it. Really.

Do they really think their service is worth 12-15 bucks a month?
- No, it's a punitive fee.
  If you need to use facebook for whatever reason, but refuse to opt in to targeted ads, we will punish you with this fee.
  
  Yup, it's just a way to force people to give up this right.
  I wish them the best of luck with this tactic. (not)
- No
  
  I'd maybe be willing to pay $12-15 per annum for no user tracking. But that price per month is a joke. They just want to deter people from paying by offering an inflated price, so they can turn around in a few months and argue there is no demand for it.

Maybe enshittification is actually a good thing. Hear me out: the worse things get, the more motivated people are to ask questions, migrate to alternatives, build better platforms, and hopefully 1) enact well-informed legislation, and 2) prevent what appears to be this "necessity" of enshittification from continuing to happen in an endless cycle.
- That's the basis for the theory behind the business life cycle. The theory goes that eventually companies mature and settle into a kind of coasting phase, where they maximise profit instead of continuing to innovate. This provides a large opening for competition, who inevitable eat the incumbent's lunch.
  Indeed, on a long enough time scale, all companies eventually die. It's just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated. I'm sure people thought that of the Dutch East India company at the time, yet it dissolved 224 years ago.
  Eventually, Facebook will kill itself. It's already done such a great job.
  
  I have a family member working at FB and they said by the end of this year they will have closed down allllll the fancy new office buildings they built in the last decade or so, and revert operations to just the main, original campus. So seems like they’re on the down-and-down for sure.
  
  The problem is their ability to gobble up new companies that could threaten them and use any innovative patients they may hold to either enrich themselves or stifle competition or both.
  
  It’s just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated
  It's also that the U.S. has shown repeatedly that it'll prop up companies with ongoing subsidies, or even bail them out as in the 2008 crisis.

Are they going to tell all the websites (with Facebook trackers) to stop tracking you when you pay? I highly doubt it.
- Yeah exactly. All those Google and Facebook tracking pixels are still firing away.
  This is merely a privacy facade. What they're really doing is double dipping (same way Twitter's doing), by charging a subscription, but still data mining and harvesting behind the scenes.
  The adage of "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is gone. Now you're both.

No they won't.
I'll take the "or else" option, please.

Well, now we'll see if the EU finally pulls its head out of their ass and clarifies that no, "consent" gained this way isn't "freely given", or if they legalize the practice and make GDPR even more of a joke.
Various DPAs have taken different positions on this, unfortunately encouraging this practice.
- You make it sound as if the EU is bad at this, while they are at the absolute forefront of fighting for our rights in several different categories.
- There has already been multiple rulings under the GDPR where pages made it too hard to reject processing of personal data.
  Google was forced to change their consent banner to make it easier to decline.
  GDPR explicitly says that it must be as easy to decline as it is to accept. Paying €14 per month is not as easy as not paying €14 per month.
  Consent is also not "freely given" if paying is the only way to avoid consenting.
  
  Unfortunately, due to lack of clarity (and lack of clarification), many DPAs (privacy regulators!) have explicitly declared the "pay with data or money" model OK.
  Google may have been one of the very few cases where a meaningful fine was given. For almost everyone else, blatantly breaking the law paid off big time.
- I seem to remember that it's already there - the consent or lack thereof cannot be the basis for denying service.
  
  It's unclear and as I said, some privacy regulators are saying it's OK. Hence the need for clarification.
- Well, now we'll see if the EU finally pulls its head out of their ass
  They're doing plenty, what are you talking about?
  
  GDPR has turned into a joke due to lack of enforcement (partially due to Ireland serving as a "privacy violation haven"). For years saying "no" to tracking required many clicks, and I don't know of any companies that received penalties that would exceed the extra profit they made from that. Even blatantly illegal schemes where not agreeing locked you out of the web site usually didn't get punished.
  Many sites still don't get proper consent, and also check out what many consider under "necessary" or "legitimate interest" cookies/tracking that you get after you said no. In hindsight, breaking the law was the only smart thing for sites to do, and many did.
  Then, this bullshit. GDPR and the original explanations were pretty clear that the intent was to ban this kind of "agree or pay" scheme, and here we are. Of course they'll do it, because they win either way. Either it's considered legal, or there are no meaningful consequences...
  This is not the only thing where the EU moves at a snails pace, ignoring that industry is making a joke out of well intended regulations. Many praise the EU for making Apple adopt USB-C. What they miss is that the attempts to standardize chargers started in 2009, when most manufacturers, Apple included, promised to agree on a standard, and then the EU let Apple dance on their nose flying loopings though loopholes for 14 years. That's right. Apple introduced Lightning after they were supposed to standardize, and the EU let them.
- The Irish DPA must be so incredibly corrupt.

Do you want to kill your business? Cause this is how you kill your business.
- I don't see why.
  Facebook was already going to make $14/mo or whatever from ads. The EU just required that people who'd rather pay than watch ads have the option to do so.
  I mean, it's just a new option. It isn't gonna make stuff worse.
  Now, one might not want to use Facebook in the first place -- I don't use Facebook -- but among those who do, some portion of people who would rather pay than look at ads have an alternative.

Does anyone realise how expensive that is? I reckon you could run a lemmy or mastodon instance charging users 1% of that.

14$ per month looks pretty expensive.
- Ublock Origin is free.
  
  The ads are not the main problem, the main problem is how the "personal ads" are chosen by harvesting and sharing all your private data.
  A tracker blocker is a more suitable solution along with the ad blocker.
- On the long run, the data you generaty by ads is probably even more valuable.
- That's the point. It's grossly overpriced because they don't want people to get it, but they need to offer it to comply with EU rules.
  Basically extorting the users.

in 2022, advertising revenue amounted to close to 113 billion U.S. dollars whereas payments and other fees revenues amounted to around two billion U.S. dollars.
With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide.
113/3 = about $38 per user per year
14*12 = $168 per user per year
Which would be a mark-up (a Zuck-up?) of 342%.
You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month, and it’s those same highly-active users that contribute the most to the ad revenue.
Having no idea how those stats actually break down, we could take a wild guess and do a Pareto Principle 80/20.
Say the top 20% active users constitute 80% of the ad revenue, and those same top 20% all switch to the paid model:
(1130.8)/(30.2) = about $151 per VIP user per year
…which is a lot closer to the $168. Zuck-up of about 11%.
80/20 is probably cutting them too much slack, but the real markup is probably closer to 11% than it is to 342%.
This is also not factoring the extra operational expense of supporting the new model.
—
Math part over, here’s my take:
This is good.
Ad-based models are toxic. We poisoned our culture, bulldozed our privacy, distorted the economy, gave unfathomable power to immature narcissistic opportunists, and underdeveloped public FOSS tech because we expected privately-owned services to be Free™ even though they could never be literally free.
This is a move towards unmasking these services and revealing the real economic gears whizzing around behind them.
The more people understand what their privacy and autonomy is worth to these companies, the more they might insist on keeping it — and maybe even seek out places where they don’t have to pay for the privilege.
—
Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of-facebook
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
- Yep and the real problem is how do you charge for them now? People seem to think running sites and services runs on unicorn farts or something.
  
  And even if you, as a user, want to pay with your wallet instead of your privacy, there are awkward logistical hurdles, especially for smaller sites.
  Entering your payment info all the time sucks. Platforms like Patreon lock you into specific tiers, which may not align with how much you actually intend to use the thing. Any direct payment at all still has the overhead of a payment processor, which will take a bigger percentage of smaller payments.

Still there will be some losers out there who'll pay that $14/month because they are loyal corp simps
- there will be far more losers who will happily hand over their data in exchange of free service
  
  "free" service. You are just paying with your data instead of money...

Cool. Btw, when do you fix your share buttons? They're still tracking without consent, right?

All that's going to do is incentivize a federated alternative.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/star-wars-memes/images/6/6d/Dew-it-galactic-republic.gif/revision/latest?cb=20211018230421
I would love for everyone to have a legit and easy to understand reason to fuck off from Meta. Also make Whatsapp cost something per message! Twitter should try it too.
- WhatsApp pre-Facebook acquisition was phenomenal. Had close to half a billion users paying $1-$3 per year. I think the team was no more than 15 and profitable.
  It was actually private and secure, and obviously sharing no metadata with Facebook as it does today.
  Oh, what coulda been. Gotta build and support Signal now. (WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton is executive chairman of Signal now.)
  
  I have used it since 2010, never paid a penny. Moving friends and relatives to Signal has been a waste of time, I feel like I have the first fax machine in the world.
- WhatsApp used to be a yearly paid app. Even though they rarely actually "collected".
  I wish it still was and Meta never got their grubby hands on it.
  
  I was one of the suckers that actually paid for Whatsapp back in 2014. Back then it was just a way to support the devs. They'll never be able to charge for Whatsapp, with all these different free options like Telegram.

But I was supposed to be the product!
- Now you can choose who is the product. All hail the free market!

I hope that also includes WhatsApp. Europeans are addicted to that shit.
- And so is the rest is the rest of the world, especially India and South America, afaik. God, I wish we could get rid of it once and for all.
  
  Tell Apple to get rid of their BS iMessage policys then. Apple are the reason iMessage doesn't work on Android, not Google.
- Shit? It works across all platforms, in all countries, unrestricted and unpaid, and thus far, adfree. That's pretty great, if you ask me.
  
  Its pretty good deal until you consider what facebook gets out of it. Privately owning the primary source of communication that a large chunk of the world uses because its free and convenient will surely have no repercussions to end users later down the line once they end the 'grow service as quickly as possible at cost' phase and enter the 'lets squeeze our users for every penny we can to get back profit and because we know they ll take it since our service is too convenient to give up' phase.
  Oh who am I kidding like anyone who uses whatsapp or any meta owned service cares about things like privacy as long as they get their free communication they are happy as peaches and will take any amount of corpo dicking
  
  Key words: "thus far"
  Facebook wouldn't have acquired it if they didn't have plans to squeeze the living soul out of it. In due time. Their hope is that by then, all alternatives will be wiped out, and with it being so integrated as a daily driver, we'll be paying a subscription, with no E2EE, sharing metadata (which btw is sometimes more valuable than the content of your messages) unwillingly.
  What's funny/crazy too is that all the top execs (including Zuck himself) use Signal. That's the irony of the digital world we live in: the closer you are to these technologies, the more you learn, and the less subjected to it you actually wanna be.
- I'm not addicted. I hate it. It's a horrible chat app. I especially hate the lack of threads (or at least pinned posts) in groups, I have to scroll through pages of garbage to see that important announcement. I also hate that it's linked to my phone. If I want to use it on my computer, because I hate typing on phones, it needs my phone to be always connected.
  I'm stuck with it because everyone else is using it.
  
  You mean you keep using this thing despite hating it? Now I’ve known a few addicts in my time and that is pretty much the definition…
- I'm addicted to Viber, not Whatsapp
  
  What is the appeal of viber? it has ads and micro transactions. A lot of people use it, but it is my least favorite.

So your personal data is essentially worth about $14 a month.
You are worth about $200 a year to advertising companies per service. What a scam.
Can I just start selling my own data on the internet for a subscription fee? Might as well capitalize on my boring lige.

I can't imagine anyone paying for this.
- Seeing how many blue marks are on twitter, more than you think
- This might be the point, offering an opt-out no one will reasonably use while complying with regulations and still tracking most users, same as before.

Earlier this year, I made a small experiment: I stopped checking my Facebook for three months. During that time, I received about 250 notifications of new posts by my friends. When I logged back in, out of the first 100 posts on my feed, 24 were from my friends and another 7 from groups I subscribed to. The rest were ads or "suggested" content. Checking my feed every day after that, I averaged 2 posts from my friends and 2 from my groups in the top 20 posts. I have since stopped checking Facebook altogether, and by this time I don't think even anonymized ads will get me back.
- Facebook has ads? I've been using FBP so long I guess I forgot they existed
  
  I only used FB in a dedicated virtual machine, with vanilla Chromium in Incognito mode. So, I got the full experience, and I hope I limited my ad relevancy (on my main VM, I use Firefox with Ghostery and Ublock Origin, which I hope stops FB button trackers).

Do not threaten me with a good time not paying for things I don't need, young man

First they manipulate their algorithms so that small businesses lose almost all visibility... Except when buying ads.
Now this?
Does that actually mean businesses won't even reach their potential customers with paid ads anymore?
- Or the paid ads will be targeted to those it is relevant to making the advertising more efficient for small business.
  I don't like fb or any meta shit and I hope they crash and burn but I don't get this particular issue.

$14 a month is insanely. maybe 1 dollar a month is reasonable. given they'll still be working their ads into 80% of the bullshit that is Facebook feeds.
- Damn, I was reading this and my head was correcting it to $14/mo for an ad-free experience, and even that was ridiculous.
  $14/mo for "ads, but we pinky swear that we won't use the data we're still definitely collecting on you to prepare your ads" is just a joke.
  How about instead, Meta pays out $14/mo per user, for the data they're collecting?

Sounds great. I stopped using Facebook years ago. This can only bring their demise faster.
- Yeah please lock me out of instagram, I beg you

So you give them $14 and hope, they don't sell your data? I never had a facebook/whatsapp account and never will and I know why.

They seem to have copied the approach from multiple European newspapers that consists to disable tracking if you subscribe. And unfortunately most data protection agencies seem okay with that.
It infuriates me that you have to pay for the basic right to not be tracked, given that you already have to be particularly tech-literate to avoid tracking by yourself...
- I find it a tough one, because they offer a product/service that costs a fortune to maintain and operate, and if they can't make money from your data then what do they do? Not having your data harvested is just a side-benefit of paying for the thing you use a dozen times per day.
  If they couldn't use your data or charge then it would shut down.
  You wouldn't run a business at a 100% loss.
  I don't understand why people think digital things should all be free.
  
  Not being tracked doesn't mean they can't have ads.
  TV ads are still a thing and so are billboard ads.
  They could simply show ads depending on the context of the content you're looking at.
  
  You can serve ads without any of the invasive tracking, and you can have paid access without any of the invasive tracking...
  I don't think most people actually think digital things should be free, just that they're not invasive data-hoarding piles of crap.
  
  I don't understand why people think digital things should all be free.
  It's not a matter of them being free. I don't care if Facebook requires a paid subscription, what I care about is that my tech illiterate mother isn't being tracked because she uses a website the majority of the population uses. Cable TV has a free option and always has without the need for tracking. Billboards exist and I've never felt tracked. Posters at the mall don't track my shopping behavior and stores don't change prices because they know I went to a similar store and they think they can pull one over.
  I don't understand why people think digital things need to know everything about me and share that info with anyone.
  
  No one's saying they can't run ads. The problem is the extreme invasion of privacy to run targeted ads. If their business can't survive without violating your privacy, then maybe their business doesn't need to survive.
  I won't even touch on the political ramifications of what privacy exploitation has created.
- and there is still ads, you don't pay for an adfree version, just to not be tracked, which is a joke

Ad targeting should just be banned outright. It serves noone and creates huge pools of easy to abuse data.

This shit gets any hotter I just might hop out

He really wants to sink that ship, doesn't he?

Here I should say that you can always donate money to good services like lemmy, mastodon, peertube or important organizations like FSF, EFF.org(if you are in USA), Linux Foudation, X.org(wayland is part of it too).
- Make sure it's x.org and not x.com lbs
  
  Yeah, the latter appears to forward you to X/Twitter and I don't think you want to be going there as Mastodon would be the better choice.

Could you EU people turn that around and charge fuckzuck 14 euros for every month you've kept your account, as that's the apparent value of your profile?
- Now that's something I could get behind... €2,352 would be pretty nice lol

Are they going to stop allowing people to edit their own interests too? What's the difference between not allowing personalization, and regularly clearing out their "collection" of your perceived interests?

I am not convinced this gets them off the hook. But I'll assume he has better lawyers than me. What it does show, is the value of forcing people to provide data to provide personalized ads.
- It probably will.
  No service should be forced to give their service for free, or be forced to offer it via ads. Facebook at any moment could say the service costs $100 a month to use, we don't care what you think or say.
  
  The big question (which is disputed, even among DPAs) is whether offering this makes it OK to offer it via ads with tracking without a way to opt out for free.
  Doing "tracking ads or no service" is illegal - the consent isn't "freely given" and thus invalid, so they'd be processing data without consent or other valid justification. Some argue that with such a model the consent is freely given...
  Either way, the max fine will be 4% of revenue, which means nothing if doing it this way doubles revenue...

No joke that would be great for privacy and putting users first. Users would go the product to the customers and the platform would actually need to cater to them.
The same would happen with Twitter.
Now, social media depends on its massive size, so even if makes the platform more user-centric, it would reduce the amount of users and reduce its value.
- So there's a metric called "ARPU" for social media, average revenue per user.
  Facebook's monthly ARPU for America+Europe is $30 (Reddit's is .49, lol)
  This is actually a pretty fair price for the service. And should be a legal requirement as an option tied to ARPU.
  
  Who is calculating and publishing that metric based on what data?

I feel like this is short-sighted on Meta's part. Since it sounds like they will still serve paid users non-personalized ads, I think they'd be better off losing a little revenue on those users who actually make the effort to turn off ad personalization. Otherwise they are going to lose users over this which is going to make Facebook just that much less relevant for the people who are willing to use it with personalized ads or pay to ONLY get non-personalized ads.
Part of the reason that their service is popular is that it has huge market share. Every time they shave off a segment of their user base Facebook becomes that much less relevant for everyone.

Honestly I'd pay 5 euros for instagram without ads. Just because it's a popular channel for friends and artists I follow and the ads in the timeline are making the whole experience so difficult.
14 is a lot though unless you work with these platforms.

“It's free and always will be”

I'd like to see them try.

I see that Mark wants to follow in Elon's footsteps. Burn it to the ground!

"personalized" ads. So does this mean if you pay $14 a month you'll still get the exact same amount of ads but they just won't be personalized? LOL
- I think it is $14 not to get ads at all. I think the EU directive is likely worded as such that it states if adverts are forced on users they must be able to opt out of targeted advertising. So his (lawyers') thinking is to provide an overpriced ad-free tier to be able to say that there's an option so he can force users to get personalized ads.
- Maybe read the article? LOL

Surprise surprise

Let's not forget that paying for an ad free experience requires providing personal info on yourself that Facebook may not have. Same applies to tiktok which is testing ad free subscription.

How about giving people a form for them to fill what kind of ads they want to see instead of spying on them to personalize ad
- Because no one wants to see ads in general. Google does this with YouTube TV (which ad do you want to watch?) and the answer is always "neither" but that's not an option.
- Partly because ads is the reason they have now for tracking you, but they hope to keep making money on your data long after you're dead.
- None, thanks!

They're missing the damned point. I have never used Facebook, but on any service if I'm paying a monthly fee it is to remove myself from the ad-based enshitification.
It's also what drives me crazy with respect to Microsoft products. I pay for MS 365, and I'd even be willing to pay for Windows if they'd leave me the fuck alone. I pay for ProtonMail and they do leave me alone, so I'll always stick with them. Any app that I use for which I can pay to remove ads, I do it... unless it's a subscription and I can't quite justify the perpetual expense, like for my preferred weather app MyRadar.
Hell, I almost bought into the MyRadar investment pitch until I saw that giving them $400 still wouldn't net me a lifetime subscription.
- Did you stop reading the post description before you got to the "ad-free" part?
  
  I'm in the USA, so if they're only considering an ad-free offering in Europe as described then my outrage stands. 😉

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