This effectively means then that if you are in the EU and you'd want to use either Facebook or Instagram you'd have to pay for a subscription then because they presumably won't offer the free-service without personalized ads and since the law prohibits them from doing that then the only way to use either service will be to pay for it..?
> Meta said it has cooperated with regulators and pointed to its announced plans to give Europeans the opportunity to consent to data collection and, later this month, to offer an ad-free subscription service in Europe that will cost 9.99 euros ($10.59) a month for access to all its products
> Tobias Judin, head of the international section at the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, said Meta's proposed steps likely won't meet European legal standards. For instance, he said, consent would have to be freely given, which wouldn't be the case if existing users had to choose between giving up their privacy rights or paying a financial penalty in the form of a subscription.
To some extent easy ad revenue has given some of these companies a version of Dutch disease, if this revenue falls away for whatever reason they'll need to win out in features or efficiency. Given that I'd be happy if facebook vanished from the face of the earth and that their website is the definition of bloat I'd say they're not doing too well in that regard.
Option A: Continue for free with ads (and tracking and profiling etc.)
Option B: Pay for a subscription without ads or tracking (most seem to use a service called "Pur" (pure))
This does not mesh with some people’s understanding of the GDPR, but at least several German courts said it’s okay.
[0]: https://netzpolitik.org/2023/alternative-zu-tracking-datensc...
Their reasoning was that GDPR says that consent must be freely given. If the site provides more service if you consent than the consent is not freely given according to those regulators.
(It seemed kind of goofy to me. In every other context I can think of consenting to something that you do not like in exchange for getting something that you want is usually considered to be freely given consent unless that something you want is something that is necessary).
This is already present in EU. Spiegel.de and others are like that. Pay or be tracked.
An alternative might be homomorphic encryption, which would already be doable with current technology for something like a newspaper.
Biggest example is the IOS privacy which has hit whole industry in terms of marketing effectiveness and cost.
It’s easy to show ads. Not that easy to make money from doing so. It’s as valid alternative as telling people to use horses instead of cars to reduce CO2 emissions. They both get from point A to B, right?
It’s simply that nobody has been sued to the end for it yet.
Too bad, if your business model can’t make money without breaking laws and harming people’s rights, do you really deserve to stay in business?
> It’s as valid alternative as telling people to use horses instead of cars to reduce CO2 emissions. They both get from point A to B, right?
More like banning formula 1 cars from suburbs. People survived before without personalized ads, what will not survive is making 10-digits of profit every quarter and the associated butchery of our life and institutions in the pursuit of profit.
If I say "car dealers can't sell cars that go faster than 10mph and if they go out of business then they shouldn't exist", it's clearly fallacious, and I don't see how this is any different.
That's not the argument I'm making nor the comment I'm responding to. OP presented non-personalized ads as a viable alternative for their business. It's not. Let's not pretend it is.
It's a totally different conversation from one you try to turn it into.
> More like banning formula 1 cars from suburbs.
It's not, unless there have been F1 cars in every suburb for last decade.
I get it, you hate ads. Great. But that's not what we're talking about.
Agreed. So why do none of the EU's moronic laws make sense?
Most normal people are happy when they come across a useful product or service as an ad in their Instagram feed. After these laws, that won't be possible anymore for an entire continent of people.
So like banning lead from paint? Wouldn’t someone think of the poor paint makers and landlords?
And legal challenges to that are in the works. Some have even been partially upheld. “Pay or okay” done as a binary choice isn’t okay, like anything else, granular consent is important:
https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=DSB_(Austria)_-_2023-0.17...
In fact, it would still make sense to track ad-free users, if for no other reason than to better target ads to their family members, coworkers, and friends. They probably like what you like.
And "Bob's birthday is coming up, he would love a Barcelona team t-shirt" would be very convincing.
Even if they get fined the 4% of annual revenue, that'll be a tiny bit of the extra money they illegally made over those 5 years. And now they'll do the pay-or-consent (which may or may not be legal), and if it's illegal, they'll happily argue for another 1-2 years then pay the fine...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/small-businesses-cou...
Also it has been written many times, but the facebook feed has became total crap: for me 99% are ads and it does not show me any updates from friends. Faster is to go to profiles of friends then scroll through the drip feed that is not even infinite. Also the feed does not show things that I can see in my friends' profiles. But hey, some product manager thinks it is good for longevity of thr product. I can as well enter facebook once per month and manually open their profiles.