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.”
This assumes everyone who values privacy can afford another $10mo sub in their life or that it should cost money in the first place. In an issue of consent that shouldn’t be the case.
Using Facebook is not something that’s necessary. You’re asking a company to give away services for free.
The whole reason it’s free is because you are the product, and it’s almost always been that way. If you value your privacy and don’t want to pay for Facebook, that’s a personal decision, and the government shouldn’t be involved.
Let’s say that I’ve never had a Facebook account, but Facebook still has a lot of data it has collected about me from multiple sources, including other Facebook users, who might post photos that I am in, or share information about me in posts, neither of which i gave consent to anyone to share.
Is it fair that my only option to protect my private information is to CREATE a Facebook account and pay them to STOP collecting and selling my private information?
That’s not what is happening here. Facebook is offering to let you pay for an ad free experience. It has nothing to do with shadow profiles.
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No, it’s not. You paying them money won’t stop them from collecting data about you. It only stops them from selling it to show targeted ads.
Don’t get me wrong, I despise meta for it and think they should be prosecuted for that immediately, but that has nothing to do with the article or what the EU is saying.
Mixing these two things just cause you hate meta will get us nowhere. Their data collection of non-users is straight up illegal, but the pay with money or data model is something that especially news sites have been using for a long time now.
You are conflating a lot of different things here and I’m a little too busy at work today to completely disentangle it, but the short version is that none of us are ignorant about what “free“ means online. That is not the debate here so I’m not sure why you’re going off on that when I don’t even disagree there in the first place. It’s just not relevant.
You’re framing this as if a facebook account were mandatory. If you can’t afford $10 per month, don’t use facebook. I don’t.
I never said anything of the sort and I don’t know why whether or not the service is mandatory matters. That isn’t the bar for us to have consumer/privacy rights.