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What if a privacy subscription costs $1000/mo? Does anybody believe you can use this "one cool trick" to circumvent EU privacy laws? FB is basically daring Eur

by gizmo 3y ago

What if a privacy subscription costs $1000/mo? Does anybody believe you can use this "one cool trick" to circumvent EU privacy laws? FB is basically daring Europe to enforce their laws. I hope the entire concept of paying for privacy gets shut down hard.

sinuhe69 3y ago
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.
- Kbelicius 3y ago
  > Social networking as a fundamental human right? 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?
  - sinuhe69 3y ago
    Yes, I find it ridiculous, too. But then tell me how would you run a platform that costs hundred of millions dollars without ads and without fee? Is that also too hard to comprehend?
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      There are services which costs less and provides way more. Meta is just setting an unjustified exorbitant price to drive people off of paid option, that's all. None of the services I pay costs that much yearly, and sum of top 5 most expensive services I use is still below that amount. ...or they're just an extremely inefficient company, I don't know.
    - ghusto 3y ago
      They couldn't, and that's a good thing. There are plenty of companies running non-targeted ads that are doing just fine, and don't cost millions of dollars to run a year. Facebook wants scale at any cost, and that is unacceptable. The argument that we have to put up with something we never asked for, but has been carefully integrated into society to be utility-like is disingenuous. I don't want Facebook or WhatsApp, but in the Netherlands they are now used by schools, and even government agencies for communication. You can't have it both ways: Either you're indispensable (something Facebook has worked very hard to become) and therefore treated as a utility, or you're a private company that can do as they please.
    - usea 3y ago
      > But then tell me how would you run a platform that costs hundred of millions dollars without ads and without fee? You wouldn't. So what? You don't need to do that.
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      > how would you run a platform Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you'd go bankrupt. Can't say I'm sad about that outcome. Businesses that are only viable if they can violate people's rights don't deserve to exist.
    - Kbelicius 3y ago
      > But then tell me how would you run a platform that costs hundred of millions dollars without ads and without fee? Is that also too hard to comprehend? No it isn't hard to comprehend but it isn't relevant here. Privacy doesn't mean no ads and nobody is preventing facebook to require users to pay a fee. It is similar to organs. It is illegal to sell/buy them. You can still freely give them away(donate them). Privacy is similar to that. You can't buy/sell it but you can freely give it away. In this situation Facebook seems to be trying to sell you your privacy.
      - ordinaryperson 3y ago
        Targeted advertising is not similar to selling internal organs.
        Kbelicius 3y ago
        I think that you replied to the wrong comment since I did not say anything like that.
    - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
      Ads and fees are both perfectly fine. Tracking without freely given consent is the only thing that is not allowed.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  > Social networking as a fundamental human right? 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
- waffleiron 3y ago
  >it’s through displaying ads; One can display ads without tracking/profiling someone.
  - sinuhe69 3y ago
    It’s absurdly naive to think other ads would not track you. All ad kits out there are tracking you! Ad is all about targeting. Once you agreed for ads, you are tracked, one way or other. But if you paid and they said they will not use your data, but they actual do, then you have all the right to sue them!
    - waffleiron 3y ago
      Posters, signs and other such ads in the real world exist without tracking. Just because it's more profitable and currently heavily used doesn't mean digital ads can't exist without profiling. The issue here isn't the ads, the issue here is the profiling. So in that regard Meta is fully allowed to run as many ads as they want, as long as they comply to GDPR (which says nothing about the ability to advertise, only about the ability to use personal/profiling data).
      - bertil 3y ago
        Not disagreeing with your statement (I think there’s a major misunderstanding around privacy and consent underlining all those arguments — and that is somewhat a personal failure) but: > Posters, signs and other such ads in the real world exist without tracking. They used to, but many posters now include fairly sophisticated tracking software—in particular the luminous/screen types. We know what it’s like to have paper glued to boards, and that existed in the real world, but it’s not that clear-cut anymore.
- VaxWithSex 3y ago
  Show ads, just don't invade my privacy :hug:
- mrweasel 3y ago
  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?
  - saurik 3y ago
    It seems weird to me that a company would actively hurt their bottom line just because I guess the argument is that they like tracking in the abstract? Like, if you are correct, and Facebook would make more money per user charging them €25 instead of showing them ads, then wouldn't they be idiots to purposefully price their product so high as to "avoid" people making them more profitable? The narrative that Facebook doesn't want to make more money on these users is just really awkward as it would imply the company doesn't have a working profit motive. Maybe a different explanation is that, sure, on average they make €20 per user per year... but the distribution of how much money they make is extremely lopsided, such as a power law. They want everyone using the platform--even the most unprofitable people--as the service only really makes sense if you can find and communicate with everyone on it... but the people who are most likely to be willing to randomly fork over a bunch of cash to not get tracked are the very kind of person who also are most likely to pay for stuff in general and so facebook in fact might be making 10x as much off these users than people who wouldn't pay for the service at any price?
    - soco 3y ago
      There are two points there: one is ads and the other is tracking. You could say that ads are based on tracking, true, but ads mean income from other parties. That should be better predictable and better estimable for Meta, making a fairly reliable basis to set the monthly user pricing. But tracking? That's a basis for many future applications which even Meta might not know yet, and giving up on that would mean ruining all those future initiatives. I'm not sure how to put a price tag on that, and I'm not sure they even want to (nor trust them).
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  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.
- latexr 3y ago
  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.
  - rich_sasha 3y ago
    Is that right? I thought GDPR lets you do mostly anything with data if you have consent (and subject to regulations about data safety etc). It seems to me FB is saying people need to either: - pay money, or - consent to handing over their data, or - have their account shut I know which option I'm choosing! But what is so wrong about this trilemma?
    - robin_reala 3y ago
      Section 42 of GDPR: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32016R0679&qid=1647443821579 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment. You need to be able to freely choose to not consent “without detriment”. Meta would like to argue the point, but I think it’s pretty clear, and they’ve lost everything so far.
      - poizan42 3y ago
        A small correction - this is recital 42, not section 42. The part of the actual text that deals with consent is to be found in Article 7. The part in 7.4 is even broader * When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.* The way I interpret that is that requiring consent for tracking / data collection for marketing is pretty much always ruled out since it can never actually be necessary.
- jdasdf 3y ago
  This is not a "Pay or see ads" issue, this is a "pay or consent" issue. Facebook can show all the ads they like, and have a "pay to not see them" option too.
jsnell 3y ago
> 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.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  > That's a weak argument, because it implies that there is a price at which this is OK. It implied the opposite to me.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    Really? If there's no price at which it's ok and it's always equally unreasonable, then why bring price into it at all? Just to be clear: I think what Meta is doing should be found non-compliant with the GDPR due to consent-or-pay not counting as freely given consent, but it is less of a slam dunk than it should be due to what the newspapers have been allowed to do. But if that argument fails, complaining about the cost being too high is not going to work as a backup strategy.
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      > If there's no price at which it's ok and it's always equally unreasonable, then why bring price into it at all? The article brought price into it. But everyone must admit $1000 would be illegal. And €12.99 is illegal for the same reason $1000 would be illegal.
- 3y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
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.

by gizmo 3y ago

sinuhe69 3y ago

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.

Kbelicius 3y ago
> Social networking as a fundamental human right? 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?
- sinuhe69 3y ago
  Yes, I find it ridiculous, too. But then tell me how would you run a platform that costs hundred of millions dollars without ads and without fee? Is that also too hard to comprehend?
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    There are services which costs less and provides way more. Meta is just setting an unjustified exorbitant price to drive people off of paid option, that's all. None of the services I pay costs that much yearly, and sum of top 5 most expensive services I use is still below that amount. ...or they're just an extremely inefficient company, I don't know.
  - ghusto 3y ago
    They couldn't, and that's a good thing. There are plenty of companies running non-targeted ads that are doing just fine, and don't cost millions of dollars to run a year. Facebook wants scale at any cost, and that is unacceptable. The argument that we have to put up with something we never asked for, but has been carefully integrated into society to be utility-like is disingenuous. I don't want Facebook or WhatsApp, but in the Netherlands they are now used by schools, and even government agencies for communication. You can't have it both ways: Either you're indispensable (something Facebook has worked very hard to become) and therefore treated as a utility, or you're a private company that can do as they please.
  - usea 3y ago
    > But then tell me how would you run a platform that costs hundred of millions dollars without ads and without fee? You wouldn't. So what? You don't need to do that.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    > how would you run a platform Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you'd go bankrupt. Can't say I'm sad about that outcome. Businesses that are only viable if they can violate people's rights don't deserve to exist.
  - Kbelicius 3y ago
    > But then tell me how would you run a platform that costs hundred of millions dollars without ads and without fee? Is that also too hard to comprehend? No it isn't hard to comprehend but it isn't relevant here. Privacy doesn't mean no ads and nobody is preventing facebook to require users to pay a fee. It is similar to organs. It is illegal to sell/buy them. You can still freely give them away(donate them). Privacy is similar to that. You can't buy/sell it but you can freely give it away. In this situation Facebook seems to be trying to sell you your privacy.
    - ordinaryperson 3y ago
      Targeted advertising is not similar to selling internal organs.
      - Kbelicius 3y ago
        I think that you replied to the wrong comment since I did not say anything like that.
  - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    Ads and fees are both perfectly fine. Tracking without freely given consent is the only thing that is not allowed.
meiraleal 3y ago
> Social networking as a fundamental human right? 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
waffleiron 3y ago
>it’s through displaying ads; One can display ads without tracking/profiling someone.
- sinuhe69 3y ago
  It’s absurdly naive to think other ads would not track you. All ad kits out there are tracking you! Ad is all about targeting. Once you agreed for ads, you are tracked, one way or other. But if you paid and they said they will not use your data, but they actual do, then you have all the right to sue them!
  - waffleiron 3y ago
    Posters, signs and other such ads in the real world exist without tracking. Just because it's more profitable and currently heavily used doesn't mean digital ads can't exist without profiling. The issue here isn't the ads, the issue here is the profiling. So in that regard Meta is fully allowed to run as many ads as they want, as long as they comply to GDPR (which says nothing about the ability to advertise, only about the ability to use personal/profiling data).
    - bertil 3y ago
      Not disagreeing with your statement (I think there’s a major misunderstanding around privacy and consent underlining all those arguments — and that is somewhat a personal failure) but: > Posters, signs and other such ads in the real world exist without tracking. They used to, but many posters now include fairly sophisticated tracking software—in particular the luminous/screen types. We know what it’s like to have paper glued to boards, and that existed in the real world, but it’s not that clear-cut anymore.
VaxWithSex 3y ago
Show ads, just don't invade my privacy :hug:
mrweasel 3y ago
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?
- saurik 3y ago
  It seems weird to me that a company would actively hurt their bottom line just because I guess the argument is that they like tracking in the abstract? Like, if you are correct, and Facebook would make more money per user charging them €25 instead of showing them ads, then wouldn't they be idiots to purposefully price their product so high as to "avoid" people making them more profitable? The narrative that Facebook doesn't want to make more money on these users is just really awkward as it would imply the company doesn't have a working profit motive. Maybe a different explanation is that, sure, on average they make €20 per user per year... but the distribution of how much money they make is extremely lopsided, such as a power law. They want everyone using the platform--even the most unprofitable people--as the service only really makes sense if you can find and communicate with everyone on it... but the people who are most likely to be willing to randomly fork over a bunch of cash to not get tracked are the very kind of person who also are most likely to pay for stuff in general and so facebook in fact might be making 10x as much off these users than people who wouldn't pay for the service at any price?
  - soco 3y ago
    There are two points there: one is ads and the other is tracking. You could say that ads are based on tracking, true, but ads mean income from other parties. That should be better predictable and better estimable for Meta, making a fairly reliable basis to set the monthly user pricing. But tracking? That's a basis for many future applications which even Meta might not know yet, and giving up on that would mean ruining all those future initiatives. I'm not sure how to put a price tag on that, and I'm not sure they even want to (nor trust them).
matheusmoreira 3y ago
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.
latexr 3y ago
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.
- rich_sasha 3y ago
  Is that right? I thought GDPR lets you do mostly anything with data if you have consent (and subject to regulations about data safety etc). It seems to me FB is saying people need to either: - pay money, or - consent to handing over their data, or - have their account shut I know which option I'm choosing! But what is so wrong about this trilemma?
  - robin_reala 3y ago
    Section 42 of GDPR: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32016R0679&qid=1647443821579 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment. You need to be able to freely choose to not consent “without detriment”. Meta would like to argue the point, but I think it’s pretty clear, and they’ve lost everything so far.
    - poizan42 3y ago
      A small correction - this is recital 42, not section 42. The part of the actual text that deals with consent is to be found in Article 7. The part in 7.4 is even broader * When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.* The way I interpret that is that requiring consent for tracking / data collection for marketing is pretty much always ruled out since it can never actually be necessary.
jdasdf 3y ago
This is not a "Pay or see ads" issue, this is a "pay or consent" issue. Facebook can show all the ads they like, and have a "pay to not see them" option too.

jsnell 3y ago

> 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.

pseudalopex 3y ago
> That's a weak argument, because it implies that there is a price at which this is OK. It implied the opposite to me.
- jsnell 3y ago
  Really? If there's no price at which it's ok and it's always equally unreasonable, then why bring price into it at all? Just to be clear: I think what Meta is doing should be found non-compliant with the GDPR due to consent-or-pay not counting as freely given consent, but it is less of a slam dunk than it should be due to what the newspapers have been allowed to do. But if that argument fails, complaining about the cost being too high is not going to work as a backup strategy.
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    > If there's no price at which it's ok and it's always equally unreasonable, then why bring price into it at all? The article brought price into it. But everyone must admit $1000 would be illegal. And €12.99 is illegal for the same reason $1000 would be illegal.
3y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

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.