7 ms·
Meta’s approach of ‘pay for your privacy’ is wrong
- oytis 3y agoOnline versions of all German printed media do exactly the same, I wonder how it's going to be different. And $10 a month is not that much of an unreasonable fee compared to EU price level.
- Kelteseth 3y agoThe thing is, that I do not trust meta not to do shady stuff with my data, regardless if I pay or not. History has shown, that they could not care less about privacy. Also, how would I, as an EU citizen even control that there are keeping my data save?
- oytis 3y ago> Also, how would I, as an EU citizen even control that there are keeping my data save? How you would do that with a EU-based company? You can sue a EU-based company, sure, but you can also sue Facebook Ireland, can't see how it's different.
- scarface_74 3y agoDo you think newspapers and magazines haven’t been selling your data for decades?
- tokai 3y agoWhat are you talking about? I can easily access multiple German newspapers and read their articles, without paying and also without having a personal profile that harvest personal information.
- oytis 3y agoWell, I've just opened FAZ for example. A popup appears giving me two options: > Wie gewohnt mit Werbung lesen Nutzen Sie FAZ.NET mit personalisierter Werbung, Werbetracking, Nutzungsanalyse und externen Multimedia-Inhalten. Details zu Cookies und Verarbeitungszwecken sowie zu Ihrer jederzeitigen Widerrufsmöglichkeit finden Sie unten, im Cookie-Manager sowie in unserer Datenschutzerklärung.* Für diese Nutzung gelten unsere Bereitstellungsbedingungen. Zugriff auf mit F+ gekennzeichnete Artikel weiterhin nur mit Bezahlabo F+. And > Werbefrei mit F.A.Z. Pur lesen Lesen Sie FAZ.NET fokussiert nahezu ohne Werbung und ohne Werbetracking für 4,99 € / 4 Wochen, als Abonnent zum Vorzugspreis von 2,99 € / 4 Wochen. Schließen Sie jetzt das F.A.Z. Pur-Abo ab. Zugriff auf mit F+ gekennzeichnete Artikel weiterhin nur mit Bezahlabo F+. Pay or be tracked and served personalized ads. Not that much different from what Facebook offers.
- explain 3y agoMajor mental gymnastics. If you want to use their products, either be served ads, pay to go ad free. Nothing special.
- andyferris 3y agoPeople accept the choice between untracked/unpersonalized ads and payment. The issue has always been the level of personalized tracking involved, which many people believe should be illegal (and many believe is already illegal in some juristictions).
- a_imho 3y agoMajor mental gymnastics. Do you want your service to be available to European customers? Play by their rules or withdraw. Nothing special.
- 0x2c8 3y agoHa! Remember when Facebook had this motto on its login page: "It's free and always will be"? Of course, you either pay with money or with your data. But still it's a bit ironic.
- yodsanklai 3y agoWell, it's still as free as it used to be since the subscription model is opt-in
- bko 3y agoAren't they being forced to? If you restrict access to valuable personal data of your users for targeted ads, you reduce how much each customer is worth. At a certain point the unit economics don't make sense. So what else can they do? Just shut down the service?
- tobr 3y agoYes, if you can’t make your business model work while following the law, you should shut down.
- scarface_74 3y agoOr you change your business model. FB is doing just that.
- weberer 3y agoIs it really that big of a revenue difference per-user only serving non-targeted ads?
- soarerz 3y agoDefinitely yes. Non targeted ads tanks click through rates which directly reduces price per ad impression. Not surprised if this is a xx% hit.
- 3y ago
- cabirum 3y agoNot using Facebook is free and protects your privacy. What Meta claims it does and does not do with it's users data is unproveable.
- sneak 3y agoNot using Instagram or WhatsApp in 2023 comes with significant social costs.
- andyferris 3y ago… not using instagram has social costs? (I lived in a place where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, but honestly I don’t even know if I know someone who uses instagram and it’s certainly not used socially meaning with people I socialise face-to-face)
- sneak 3y agoInstagram is the default DM platform for young adults in my experience. When I meet new people in non-business contexts they always ask for my IG username (which I of course don’t have).
- johnchristopher 3y agoDepends where you live. Brazil is not Japan.
- kredd 3y agoIn non-WhatsApp ubiquitous places, “what’s your IG?” is the standard when you meet someone in the wild. You can always go with “oh, just WhatsApp me!”, but then again you’re still on Meta. I’m talking about age range till like 35ish, probably. Also, significant chunk of people don’t use Instagram/Facebook for posts, but just like another messaging app. I basically have my notifications enabled for DMs, and not that interested in content scrolling.
- sys_64738 3y agoI want Facebook to die. It is a terrible stain on humanity.
- DrBazza 3y agoTwitter/X enters the chat. I've deleted all social apps from my phone except Facebook, and the only reason I use that is to share photos with elderly relatives. At least I don't get unsolicited racism and gore in my Facebook feed. Twitter on the other hand has been so utterly awful over the last two months that it finally pushed me to delete it everywhere. I don't go looking for that kind of stuff, yet somehow the Algorithm promotes it.
- vouaobrasil 3y agoI remember when Facebook first came out. Someone told me, "join this cool social network". I was curious and took a look...at their privacy policy. After one reading, I closed the browser and never joined to this day. What a horrible company. May they burn.
- baz00 3y agoThis. I have never owned a Facebook account, a fact I am glad about.
- pavlov 3y agoHow do you know someone doesn’t have a Facebook account? You don’t actually need to search for them on Facebook, they’ll surely tell you about it everywhere else.
- baz00 3y agoYou're mistaking us for vegans :)
- ragestorm 3y agoMeta still built a profile on you based off your friends posting. I believe that this is what got them into trouble in the US (shadow accounts).
- scarface_74 3y agoDo you use Google? YouTube? Own an Android phone?
- FabHK 3y agoWhen I joined Facebook, I also read their privacy policy, and sent an email to them complaining about it. Dustin Moskovitz answered, saying not to worry, they copied it verbatim from Friendster, so it was fine...
- parasti 3y agoI'm willing to pay, but what they're asking is too much, given that it's per account (FB and IG accounts are apparently not the same account). It seems very intentional, too. Even the way the in-app texts are constructed, it seems they really don't want me to pay.
- rado 3y agoYes, I tried it for a month and it's undeniably better, but too expensive. €1/month and no Suggested posts, please.
- a_imho 3y agoDo Data Deletion Requests solve this issue under GDPR? Just keep sending them their way and let them deal with them.
- anuraaga 3y agoYouTube premium allows watching content without ads for a similar price. It's unlikely that they actually stop Google trackers for youtube premium users though so you pay and get no privacy benefit. Assuming that a different content medium, Facebook actually implements a subscription that removes ads and trackers, that would be a win, wouldn't it?
- iteratethis 3y agoMany people here are conflating the idea of paying versus ads, whilst the discussion is about privacy instead. There's nothing wrong with charging money for a service or alternatively let them watch ads. The problem is that the ads are tracking ads. If they would be simple contextual ads (dynamic based on surrounding content), there would be no privacy violation and thus no issue. I believe the EU direction is that when you decline tracking, it should have no meaningful impact on your experience. Because if that would be the case, there's no real "free consent". Again, declining tracking is not the same as declining ads. Privacy should not cost money to secure, it should be a default and is a basic human right. Facebook obviously disagrees.
- scarface_74 3y agoIt’s really not that hard. If you care about your privacy, don’t use products that don’t coincide with your beliefs
- sime2009 3y agoIt's really not that hard. Under GDPR you have a right to privacy, and companies can't demand you give it up as part of some kind of condition to gain access to their service.
- scarface_74 3y agoAnd Facebook came up with a reasonable alternative - you can exchange your money for the service.
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoThey came up with an illegal alternative. If they want to run a paid service, fine, but they can't make avoiding tracking contingent on payment.
- scarface_74 3y ago
- Devasta 3y agoIf anything I'd be shocked if they didn't sell the data of those who paid. If you pay for Facebook you have more money than you know what to do with, the list of users who do so are the Glengarry leads that every sales org would desparately want.
- Drakim 3y agoWasn't Meta the company that started using 2-factor phone numbers for targets of advertisements?
- scarface_74 3y agoNone of the major ad tech companies “sell your data”. They sell access to you based on the data that they have. The data they have on you is much too valuable to sell.
- cvwright 3y agoThis is correct. They give your data for free to a group of advertisers and let them bid on who will pay the most to show you an ad.
- scarface_74 3y agoThey do no such thing. The advertisers never have your data. The advertisers tell Facebook which demographic they want to target and Facebook obliges.
- j16sdiz 3y agoI think I would pay if facebook could somehow _prove_ they don't track me. I don't think they could do that. I, therefore, haven't pay yet.
- sbarre 3y agoIn the old days you had to pay the phone company for them to not list your full name, home address and phone number in the phone book that every household had.
- KaiserPro 3y agoI'm not entirely sure the article gets it right either. You're not paying to have your privacy respected. Your data will still be processed in the same way. You are paying to not have adverts. I'm pretty sure that the Terms of Service are almost identical. You still will get binned into person of type x, y & z. the only difference is that advertisers won't see you. Its not exactly adding +1 to privacy. edit the reason this gets around GDPR is that whilst your data is still being processed, the product is not being shared with third parties.
- huitzitziltzin 3y agoThey run an expensive service! Ballpark their (hypothetical) “AWS costs” at the scale and latency at which they operate. Someone has to pay for it. If not the users, then the advertisers. If the advertisers, Meta is going to be accountable to advertisers to an extent in terms of what they measure and report and that requires data. Is this even hard to understand??? If this were your service, you would have exactly the same two options to pay for it. If you don’t like Meta or advertisers having data about you, don’t use Meta’s services! Acting like there is some “human right to use Instagram on your own terms” is deeply mysterious to me. There isn’t. You know how the deal works. You get the service and they advertise to you.
- olivergregory 3y agoWell, the deal is indeed they advertise to me. But they may not tell "you pay with your privacy or your money". That's the law. There are other forms of advertising that are not based on my private data. Those forms of advertising pay less? That's the problem of Meta, not mine.
- dfxm12 3y agoIf you don’t like Meta or advertisers having data about you, don’t use Meta’s services! Meta famously created "shadow profiles" of people who didn't use their services.
- hackideiomat 3y agoAnd avoiding facebooks SDKs and whatever is ultra hard
- ChrisRR 3y agoAnd yet specifically disallowed people from creating second facebook accounts to use on their Quests specifically so that they could separate their social accounts from the purchases.
- NoboruWataya 3y agoI think a lot of people have been so engrossed in social media for so long that they genuinely don't know what they would do without it. It is an integral part of their life. In fairness, if all your friends and family use a particular platform to communicate, I can see why people might feel that way. Not that it gives anyone a right to use the platform on their own desired terms but I can understand why it would be a big deal if the main method of communication with friends and family were to come with deeply disagreeable terms and conditions. But as you say, someone needs to pay for it. To me it's healthy to normalise paying with cash for the services we consume as at least it is transparent and helps to ensure an alignment of interests. My main concern is that it results in a two-tiered approach where the well-off can afford privacy and the poor can't.
- red_admiral 3y agoThe law is what the courts say it is. Many German newspapers have gone with the "we're a paid service but we'll offer it for free if you consent to tracking" approach, which has so far held in the lower courts, but hasn't (last time I checked) been decided in the equivalent of the Supreme Court, neither in Germany nor EU-wide. Facebook would be a good test case for this. That said, if you run facebook in a separate browser profile or container, or even have a good tracker-blocking list and extension running and don't let FB set third-party cookies, then it's a lot harder for them to track you off the platform. You then just need to decide how much of your life you put on FB itself.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- sharemywin 3y agoDoes facebook actually sell data? I know you can run ads, but the suggested practice currently is to leave the ad interests open and let the algorithm figure out the best users for conversions. Second, tracking likes and comments is required to offer the service you can't show likes and comments without it. And I bet that most of actually ad data is just weights in a neural network not even readable by humans.
- izzydata 3y agoAre they intentionally conflating privacy with ads? They are still going to harvest your data either way.
- merelysounds 3y agoAt the risk of stating the obvious: - It’s fine to offer a paid service and an ad supported free tier. - It’s not fine to always personalize ads; this should be opt in (with an option to withdraw consent at any time and without costs).
- AlexandrB 3y agoI'm surprised anyone actually believes that paying will mean that Meta doesn't collect tracking data about you as opposed to flipping a bit in a database somewhere that says "don't show personalized ad content". The latter is simpler and gives Meta a nice profile to use for targeting ads if/when you stop paying.
- pashadee 3y agoThe ruling says "if necessary...". This swings both ways: It is not necessary to charge, and also not possible, due to the GDPR. Faecbook can run ads, and support their business, and do it without profiling everyone. Have free: non personalized ad supported. Have paid: no ads. FB making it clear here that they really want and need your data.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- narinxas 3y agowell, tuta's business model seem to boil down to "vendor lock in" (from my viewpoint, I pay for their service and I haven't decided how I feel about the new plans so maybe my opinion is outdated)
- narinxas 3y agowell, tuta's business model seem to boil down to "vendor lock in" I say this as a paying customer, but I'll admit I haven't decided how I feel about the new plans (as announced together with the name change) so maybe my opinion is outdated