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.
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
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Very X of you, facebook
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.
knowing EU they would be against and just add a rule that every app should have ability to opt out in EU in like 2 years :D
Which is still better than the majority of other countries.
In the US they even encourage tracking…
It’s not all that different from the “Accept cookies or pay”-walls that news outlets have implemented in the last couple of years.
Those aren’t legal in the EU. But hard to enforce for lots of sites
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”.
Go for it. Really.
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.
My current employer went from rigid 100% office attendance, a là Office Space and cubes and dress codes and Nina, to 0%, overnight, for COVID. They sold most of the space but for 2 permanent and 4 more hotel spots, they have meeting spaces and a revolving receiver assignment for packages, but the entirety of the staff is effectively remote since the state of emergency was declared. Transition was fast and furious and they survived with most of their sanity intact. They wrote remote-first into the union contract, and quietly mention it’s from anywhere in the country.
Reduction in space doesn’t mean reduction in staff nor mandate. We’re only growing.
Just, look for other indicators.
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.
That is the premise used to argue that one day a zombie company will emerge which will live forever. In millennia, it has never happened. I’m fairly confident it’s unlikely. These companies eventually allow their culture and focus to settle into complacency. Buying other companies can’t solve that. In fact, it hastens their demise, as they spend large sums of money on companies they’re incapable of properly utilising.
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.
I have to concur with the concern. It’s not a free market if we don’t let bad businesses fail. What’s that saying? Privatised profits and socialised losses? Less of that please.
That’s true, but it also took 200 years for it to die. 200 years is “forever” for all those people who were born and died while it existed. Even if we assume that people waited to the ripe old age of 25 to have kids That means that there could have been 7 generations of a given family that were born and died while it existed.
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Sometimes you gotta (knowingly) be a little crazy, a little delusional, juuust enough to keep going… otherwise, if it feels like a lost cause, then there’s no motivation.
As I got older, I was like damn… Some people work so hard to make things worse, I gotta work at least as hard to combat it lol
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.
I think the goal is to say they offer both an ad free and ad supported experience. The user then can choose which they want. This may skirt some grey areas in the law since it really puts the burden on the user to choose.
Facebook obviously makes more the 12 to 15 dollars per year per user on ads.
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.
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.
uBlock blocks most trackers already. Also using Fingerprinting protection via another extension or if you’re on Firefox on its settings, they probably won’t get much data on you with ads.
correct, actually both together. dns blocking both trackers and ads will result in your profile never being harvested. It will still be there with limited info, whatever they have gathered from facebook scrolling, likes, chat and comments, but it will not be queried in order to show you ads.
Privacy Badger does a good job blocking Facebook trackers.
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.
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?
