> 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.
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.
It’s simply that nobody has been sued to the end for it yet.
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.