Awful to see our personal privacy and social lives being ransomed like this. €10 seems like a price gouge for a social media site, and I’m even seeing a price tag of 150SEK (~€15) In Sweden.
unrelated, but why can’t I see a single comment?
I noticed that a lot of comments don’t show up if you don’t set your language right in your lemmy settings. I just set it to N/A and also shift clicked on English, and it made a lot of invisible comments show up.
that actually did the trick. thank you so much
Did you pay for them? It’s 12c per comment, or you can buy the whole thread for 70c
Is it a good news for alternative social media ?
I mean now that people have to pay to use facebook, wouldn’t they move to the fedi ?
Also do we want the racist uncle and the boomer memes on the fedi ?
People don’t have to pay though. The general idea that I hear from most is, that by accepting, things will be as they habe always been. They don’t realise or seem to care thatbit has always been illegal
You can still choose to use the “free” version where you have to accept all the cookies, trackers and I don’t know what else.
True, that part never changed. I’m not using any Facebook social networks, so it doesn’t affect me. But adding more options doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me, even though the price seems pretty steep.
Shit thing for me, I use it to reach guests and make announcements for the restaurant. Sucks but that’s where most people still get local information.
Price is a thing, but having the option to chose is definitely good.
Now comes the real question: do you really trust the Zuck to implement a “do not share/sell anything” policy ? 'Cause yeah, if I’m paying, I’m expecting that none of my data is being sold/processed/transmitted to another company. Paying to just remove ads is … pointless.
the fact I don’t trust this lizardman any farther than I could toss him is the reason I took it as an opportunity to say goodbye to anything Meta-related.
I haven’t trust him and his “company” before, I won’t start with it now and throw money at him
I mean I would argue that the important choice - not use FB/Instagram at all - isn’t an option for most people. People’s lives depend on this software, a lot of people would have a really hard time connecting with friends or participating in community organizations without access to Meta’s locked-in user base.
This is why the option to pay for your own privacy rights is a false choice, and why these gatekeepers need stricter regulation from the EU. These companies make billions in profits from their monopoly positions and privacy rights abuses.
Honest question:
If you feel these tools are essential and there are no other options (not sure I agree, but that seems to be the argument you were making; let me know if I am wrong), what is the alternative?
These things take money to keep the infrastructure running, pay staff, patch security vulnerabilities, and bring new features for those same communities to use. And they are also a public company, which means they have a legal responsibility to return money to shareholders.
I’m not defending Meta, I refuse to use their platforms and will not be buying any of their hardware. But if it takes money to keep the lights on (at a minimum), how does offering ads or a subscription equate to a false choice?
Those are good questions. I definitely think people should be paid for their labor and that companies should be paid for their goods and services. In most situations, I even think that they should be able to freely set their own prices, and sell ads.
However, I do not think that they should be able to use someone’s personal data unless they freely consent to it, or it is a direct consequence of the type of service they are providing. Selling ad space to a third party does not count.
The other exception to this philosophy are monopolies. Monopolies have exceptional power to abuse their consumers and should have limits on their ability to price gouge, among other things. Facebook and Instagram are monopolies, and there is no alternative to the platform that they control. There are plenty of competitors, but even if a competitor like Friendica or PixelFed can out-compete Meta on features, price, and quality, it is impossible for them to compete when it comes to having a platform with 1 billion locked-in users. This applies on both a local level, a persons’ friends may only be active users of Facebook, and nothing else; As well on a national level, Platforms like Mastodon have to fight an uphill battle when Meta can leverage their user base to make Threads leapfrog Mastodon.
It does not cost Meta €10-€15 a user to run FB or Instagram. Nor do they even make that much in revenue from ads, personalized or otherwise. It’s pure, monopolistic, price gouging to look good to the regulators.
I pay $20/month to support Lemmy’s development. I would honestly be happy to pay the same to Pixelfed. As it is right now, I will probably pay the €25 that Meta will gouge me for to preserve my privacy rights across my various Meta accounts. I have no other choice, 80% of my social life would vanish if I lost all the connections and event feeds that I have manually added to FB and Instagram.
The thing is, there’s no “we’ll show you generic ads with no tracking” option. It’s accept being tracked or pay (two shitty options).
It seems that companies can’t do ads nowadays unless it’s targeted ads, and that makes you think it’s not ads what gives money, but selling your data. To whom? For what ends? You’ll never know. And that’s the problem.
So, the options given are unacceptable. The only reasonable option is to download your data and close the account.
They won’t stop tracking you. They’ll just not show you ads. They can still track amdnusr the data though to customise your feed according to your data.
I’ve uninstalled the apps.
Also the price is pr account. It’s not a reasonable price but they don’t want you to pick that option anyway
100% this. I’d argue though, that the price point is fair. In 2018, Facebook earned an average of roughly $110 in ad revenue per American user according to this article.
The price might be fair for american users. The average european user makes Facebook about $60 per year. Sorce: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average-revenue-per-user-by-region/
That’s impressive that customers pay that much to advertise on Facebook if true. that’s an average CPM of like $50. (5 cents per ad view)
At the same time, that article also claims that personalized ads are only worth 2x as much as regular ads, so that implies that FB/Instagram users should have the option to pay $5/month for ads without data tracking. I doubt that personalized ads are actually worth that much, but still.
They’ll sell your data up until you pay, right? So if I’ve had an account for 15 years, and then start paying, my 15 years of data is still at their disposal.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union will be charged up to €12.99 a month for ad-free versions of the social networks as a way to comply with the bloc’s data privacy rules, parent company Meta said on Monday.
The higher prices reflect commissions charged by the Apple and Google app stores on in-app payments, the company said in a blogpost.
The company’s main way of making money is to tailor ads for individual users based on their online interests and digital activity.
Under the EU’s Digital Markets Act legislation, Meta platforms will have to gain explicit consent before tracking a user for advertising purposes.
The paid option “balances the requirements of European regulators while giving users choice and allowing Meta to continue serving all people”, the company’s statement reads.
Users aged 18 and older in the EU’s 27 member countries, plus Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein will still have the choice of continuing to use Facebook or Instagram with ads.
The original article contains 357 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 55%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The wording in the message was also “we won’t use your data for ads” - which I understood as that they will still track it…
They sure will! They basically just removed untargeted ads and replaced it with addfree subscription. Major loss for users
Suddenly Lemmy hosting costs seem really low…
Lemmy isn’t a social network like Facebook though
But pixelfed is a social network like Instagram
There is Pixelfed, Mastodon, Firefish etc
Yeah, we don’t need to support greedy capitalists, and also all the extra stuff that comes with being an actual company.
This is a classic. Make the price high enough that nobody wants to pay it, but low enough that law enforcement doesn’t complain. Everybody will click on the „I’m Ok with tracking“ button.
And for those who pay, they will still probably sell their data to advertisers and hike the prices in 2-3 years.
They don’t sell the data. It is used by Facebook to identify you and your interests and advertisers then pay Facebook to use this information to target their desired audiences with relevant ads. The data stays with Facebook. It’s misleading to to say that they’re selling your data because that’s not exactly what’s happening. Advertiser has no use for the user data itself. Advertising platforms do.
erm…Cambridge Analytica?
They didn’t sell that data either
They don’t sell the data, they sell access to the data and some other things they calculated from it. That’s just semantics at this point.
Social media ≠ social lives.
People need to remember this and not give their social lives to private companies.
Unfortunately, trans people and otherkin don’t have much choice if they want to be safe in certain areas
otherkin
lol
I agree. I’m myself part of a minority and social media are great to find a community and exchange with people of this community.
My comment was about the post speaking about Meta. My go to for a safe space is now Mastodon which I don’t consider as a company. We can always change instance or build our own. This is really different from other social media.
To provide a better point, I could answer to your comment from here. This is a huge difference between the closed Meta and federation.
You said social media isn’t social lives. I think Lemmy and Mastodon are still social media.
My first comment has two statements if not three. The first is about social media and social lives. And, we have to learn that these aren’t the same. They have different definitions and are two separate things.
The second is about private companies and that we don’t have to put our social lives in the hand of private companies. The article is about Meta.
Now, Lemmy and Mastodon are different as they are federate social media. They don’t follow the second statement but the first is still true. And people have to keep this in mind when they use Lemmy and Mastodon. They must differentiate between social media and lives. If people use these two, they only avoid the private companies.
Now, Lemmy and Mastodon is a ridiculous small fraction of social media users. The vast majority relies on private companies. And people put their social lives there. This is an issues.
I think forcing a differentiation between social media and social lives can be dangerous. I say this in the context of trans and otherkin people who use free social media. I think they are in the best position to judge their own safety individually.
You’re speaking about accessibility of the safe space. It’s easier to access a social media and use it as a safe space. But, it doesn’t opposite with the fact that social live and social media are different.
Safe space was a thing before the event of social media. Social media helps people discovering their differences and accepting these. This is access to the information and not social live. I didn’t write people have to avoid social media.
Before the wide spreading of the internet, people would move to a different town, will reach specific places for safe spaces. They were free or used networks and didn’t rely on private companies like Meta. This is a huge difference.
I think you’re ignoring me again. I said in the context of trans people who use free social media. Like the fediverse.
And yeah, we had ways of doing it before the internet. And they sucked. Fewer people knew they were queer, and they stayed closeted for longer. And their safe spaces could be raided by the police, and that’s how we got Stonewall. I like the internet better.
Most of society doesn’t realize this yet, sadly.
In the case of Facebook, the average value of an active user’s data to Facebook is about $2 per months.
They shouldn’t be allowed to charge more than that.
Respectfully, an article from four years ago that I cannot read in full without creating an account, which seems to just reference a calculator from FT that is over a decade old at this point (whose sources I also cannot seem to find) doesn’t impress me. Do you have anything more recent, preferably that sites sources, that you can share? I’m genuinely interested in what data is actually worth
All valid points. Tbh I’m not on FB or any of meta’s services, and I don’t care about FB enough to put in more research time. I consider this a data point to start from.
Facebook should be required to show how a single set of a random user’s data actually means even close to 13€ a month of revenue for them. This is not a good they willingly put out on the market, this is an alternative the law forces them to give to people, and it should actually have to be equivalent.
Instead of paying 10€/month for a desktop subscribtion you can also just use adblocker which does the exact same thing.
An ad blocker doesn’t prevent FB and Instagram internal tracking and usage of personal data, and they don’t work on the phone app.
Neither does the subscribtion
Fair enough.
Very good news for free open source solutions!
