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.
I guess this is a fair indication then of how much Meta receives per person from advertisers…
There is always a grift, I’d expect the charge to users to be probably 20-50% higher than the revenue from normal users.
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OK, but do I get a blue tick?
You can wear a dunce cap for free.
I’m thinking $4.99 for the DunceCap* premium filter
one-time use only, usage of filter gives consent in perpetuity, with no restrictions, for Meta to scan your entire disgusting naked body for usage in Meta’s upcoming “MoleCheck” biometric security login feature*
**Usage of MoleCheck grants Meta perpetual license with no restrictions to train its “Dr. ZuckCancer” AI (not a real doctor) on your disgusting naked body and to withhold any cancer diagnosis Dr. ZuckCancer (not a real doctor) might find if you have not paid your monthly subscription to “MetaMedical”, a real bargain at only $350/week! Remember, choose MetaMedical, because “You Might as Well, We Already Have Your Medical Records Anyway!”
Why would paid users need to compensate for free users? This is a per user choice between ad personalization or a monthly fee. The “free” users will still be generating revenue the existing way.
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The paid version is ad-free.
The free version still has all the ads.
Both will generate revenue.
Except they are not forcing you to pay. You can still use it as it is right now.
Add an extra 0 if reddit API stuff was any indication
Yes. I think they are padding this to make it feel more punitive. This flips the bird to the regulatory body, and discourages people from switching. Frankly I’m surprised they didn’t make it higher.
Your money will always be less valuable than your data.
The amount is based on the threshold at which they believe most people will just accept the ad terms rather than pay. Thus it is slightly more than pretty much any other mainstream streaming or subscription service.
Perversely; I’m always less inclined to buy a product that I’ve seen advertised… “Why do they need to advertise it? It can’t be up to much.” And “Part of the ticket price has gone into advertising, so it’s not so valuable a thing.”, usually being my first thoughts.
While that’s totally fair, I’d argue that new businesses have to reach customers somehow, and social media is a cheap and effective advertising tool.
Meta received about 4-5$ per user per month, so the Zuck is pulling everyone’s legs here.
Edit: 3-4$.
The users willing to pay are the most valuable users on the platform for advertisers because they are, let me consult my notes… willing to pay for things.
The logical conclusion is you must charge more for users to not get ads than your average revenue per user from ads or you end up losing money because the quality of your non paying users has taken a nose dive.
This guy businesses
And then you lose the entire community, because of the sheer drop of the population. You can’t run a social media platform with just “whales”.
This might be unpopular, but here goes nothing:
With the correct and fitting (and fair) regulations, oversight by the government and accountabilit, this is a correct and more ethical decision.
Stuff costs money. For now. Infrastructure, wages, repairs, fixes, improvements, new features.
All these things dont come free and we only pay nothing DIRECTLY, because we pay in data, attention and privacy violations.
By fixing this issue, the access to all these things can be secured without the plattform falling appart or having to resort to invasive data harvesting. We could even make these practices illegal, because plattforms would not just die then.
And no, the price should not be so high to generate profit for the executives. Thats why regulation is so important.
In the Modern Age we live in, Social Media is at this point akin to an essential service and should therefore be regulated as such: No profit, but stable maintenance and secure access free from monetary interest for everyone equally.
Lots of people want SM to just fall off the face of the earth, but they forget that nothing close to it has ever existed in human history. It’s completely new and there will be and have been mistakes, from giant to small. There’s no going back, only forwards, we need to learn and regulate as needed.
We learned that keeping it “free” for the end user leads to severe privacy implications as the service needs to make money not just for profit but just to keep things running and put out new features and fixes.
At it’s core, SM gives the smallest of us (For better or for worse) a voice to the level that in the past was achievable only for the rich and the noble and interconnects us all globally better than anything that has ever come before it.
If we can learn to mitigate the bad parts I think SM will end up being a boon for humanity
Its not new, its just a different platform. Pub, forum, market, square, plaza, community hall, water cooler. Humans are fundamentally social animals and there have always been public forums were the community gathers to meet, chat, and share news and gossip. Those physical places have essentially all been wiped out in modern western countries now as it let’s all people in an area gather and share ideas. That’s really bad for capitalism and for our increasingly fascist governments. So they close the pubs, run roads the the forums and close the markers to build a new Walmart. Social media is there now to provide for the need but to do it in a a way that divides people instead of bringing them together, and controls what they see and hear so they stay compliant.
I think the idea of social media dividing us ignores the scale of it. All those other examples you gave were very local, and in that environment a consensus can form about certain political or ideological views. Those views could be vastly different than those a similar sized community holds 100 miles away though. Social media and it’s global scale exposes those differences and makes consensus on any sort of issue impossible.
At the same time it also allows for minority solidarity outside of the traditional local community. For example there may only be 1 or 2 LGBT+ people in a town, which can easily be marginalized, shamed and ignored. But if they’re able to communicate across geographic boundaries they’re able to create a larger stronger community that is harder to ignore. It also does the same for nazis though.
“Gathering together and sharing ideas is bad for capitalism” care to explain that point further? I’m not really following.
Not the original commenter, but I’m going to go ahead and assume he meant that the forum has no place in the traditional ‘bread and circuses’ used to control masses.
Free exchange of ideas and healthy debate mostly yields good philosophies or slight enlightenment of people participating (and when they get back home they bring that with them and spread the enlightenment), though one should consider whether these romanticized versions of the pub and the forum are actually in line with reality. In order to have a good debate you need the right people and the right place.
I would assume that the base example would be workers gathering in a pub and thinking ‘what if none of us works tomorrow? who’s going to build their stuff?’. And some might not have even thought of that before. And this leads to unionizing.
Contrast that with a platform like facebook that channels you into a place where you find what you already know and think you want via algorithm, and thus are basically shielded from knowing stuff you don’t already. Knowledge is power and all that. Sure, the forums and pubs are fairly easy to poison, but it takes more effort.
This is an insightful perspective and I agree in principle I think.
the price should not be so high
I think the $14 is actually egregious. Punitive even. The cost to facebook of providing content per user per month would be less than $1. Let’s not forget that they can still earn revenue from these users, it’s just the data profiling that’s limited so their ads may be less efficient to some degree.
Social Media is at this point akin to an essential service
Yeah, access to facebook probably is an essential service. Particularly for people who are disadvantaged or impoverished. But, I do wish it wasn’t so, and mandating that facebook provide access is the wrong approach IMO. I would rather see open, free-from-advertising platforms promoted.
Imagine if every town or city had it’s own lemmy & mastodon instances - not necessarily even federated. All your fb marketplace stuff, community and social groups happening there instead of facebook.
People on the internet are too used to having everything for free. But then they also want no ads and trackers. Do they expect everything to be built by some slaves or by volunteers?
I just don’t get why this should be an unpopular opinion at all.
p.s. I don’t use Facebook. Or any other social media really.
I expect some sods grandma (or even my own) to watch the ad on my behalf.
Do they expect everything to be built by some slaves or by volunteers?
I feel like those “I want FOSS for everything” people seriously thinks software devs are slaves who must fulfill their wishes at any time and if they happened to make money in some way or other, it’s like they are the devils themselves.
it doesn’t matter if it’s a company or one guy who purely spends his free time with a project.
Would have been nice if they decided to give that option during the early days when they made the decision to start mining data and selling it off. I totally would have been up for a reasonable fee to keep my data felt bad for Julian from being sold.
FB is struggling with an interesting problem. If you have enough early adopters, the rest of the population will follow. These things behave a bit like the critical mass in nuclear fission. Once you cross over a specific threshold, that’s when things start happening. In the early days of FB, it was all about growth and providing value to the users.
Once they had enough users, they started selling user data to advertisers. At that point, most users weren’t particularly privacy aware, and you could argue that it still isn’t ja major concern for a most people who use platforms like Tweetook or Snapstgram. People here on Lemmy aren’t really a representative sample of the rest of the population.
Providing a privacy friendly option wasn’t really that necessary back in those days. Providing a paid option might also hurt the ad sales, so that would have been a risky move. If only a certain part of the uses are subjected to data harvesting and ads, you’re essentially selling an inferior product to the advertisers. Sounds like a very risky move if the subscription becomes more popular.
If that happens FB would have to cross that bridge quickly. Being in the middle is a very precarious position, because the way I see it, these options don’t really support each other.
zuck’s ego fueled endeavors cost money, actual services upkeep and development is a small fraction of it.
this lizard already has insanely profitable business at hand, but it’s hard to combine steady performance for shareholders and shit like metaverse at the same time, so he needs to milk users for even more money.
It really is kind of crazy how angry people get now at the thought of paying for something they use daily.
Lol, thanks for helping convince all my relatives and friends to finally leave Facebook then, Facebook. Couldn’t think of a better incentive myself.
don’t worry, they’ll just agree to the profiling.
At first I was like hell yeah finally the corrupt politicians in my country will end. Then I read your comment and saw the dry old boney finger clicking the blue button instead of the small text just to get the pop-up gone
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
Well, now we’ll see if the EU finally pulls its head out of their ass and clarifies that no, “consent” gained this way isn’t “freely given”, or if they legalize the practice and make GDPR even more of a joke.
Various DPAs have taken different positions on this, unfortunately encouraging this practice.
You make it sound as if the EU is bad at this, while they are at the absolute forefront of fighting for our rights in several different categories.
There has already been multiple rulings under the GDPR where pages made it too hard to reject processing of personal data.
Google was forced to change their consent banner to make it easier to decline.
GDPR explicitly says that it must be as easy to decline as it is to accept. Paying €14 per month is not as easy as not paying €14 per month.
Consent is also not “freely given” if paying is the only way to avoid consenting.
Unfortunately, due to lack of clarity (and lack of clarification), many DPAs (privacy regulators!) have explicitly declared the “pay with data or money” model OK.
Google may have been one of the very few cases where a meaningful fine was given. For almost everyone else, blatantly breaking the law paid off big time.
Yeah, you’re right, it seems many of these sites are getting a free pass, and reaping she benefits… Eventhough it’s obviously not allowed by the GDPR.
I seem to remember that it’s already there - the consent or lack thereof cannot be the basis for denying service.
It’s unclear and as I said, some privacy regulators are saying it’s OK. Hence the need for clarification.
The Irish DPA must be so incredibly corrupt.
Well, now we’ll see if the EU finally pulls its head out of their ass
They’re doing plenty, what are you talking about?
GDPR has turned into a joke due to lack of enforcement (partially due to Ireland serving as a “privacy violation haven”). For years saying “no” to tracking required many clicks, and I don’t know of any companies that received penalties that would exceed the extra profit they made from that. Even blatantly illegal schemes where not agreeing locked you out of the web site usually didn’t get punished.
Many sites still don’t get proper consent, and also check out what many consider under “necessary” or “legitimate interest” cookies/tracking that you get after you said no. In hindsight, breaking the law was the only smart thing for sites to do, and many did.
Then, this bullshit. GDPR and the original explanations were pretty clear that the intent was to ban this kind of “agree or pay” scheme, and here we are. Of course they’ll do it, because they win either way. Either it’s considered legal, or there are no meaningful consequences…
This is not the only thing where the EU moves at a snails pace, ignoring that industry is making a joke out of well intended regulations. Many praise the EU for making Apple adopt USB-C. What they miss is that the attempts to standardize chargers started in 2009, when most manufacturers, Apple included, promised to agree on a standard, and then the EU let Apple dance on their nose flying loopings though loopholes for 14 years. That’s right. Apple introduced Lightning after they were supposed to standardize, and the EU let them.
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.
