Meta is preparing to charge EU users a $14 monthly subscription fee to access Instagram on their phones unless they allow the company to use their personal information for targeted ads.
The US tech giant will also charge $17 for Facebook and Instagram together for use on desktop, said two people with direct knowledge of the plans, which are likely to be rolled out in coming weeks.
The move comes after discussions with regulators in the bloc who have been seeking to curb the way big tech companies profit from the data they get from their users for free, which would be a direct attack on the way groups such as Meta and Google generate their profits.
Is anyone really stupid enough to think that even if you pay, Facebook won’t monetise your behaviour anyway? Sure, you might not see ads, but paying customer or not, your data is still going to be used for literally everything else Facebook does.
I hope people don’t fall for this nonsense.
Might have fallen for it if they had started this more than half a decade ago.
Is there any difference between this and clicking on “reject” in cookie warnings and hoping they won’t use the data as promised?
The perpetual growth tech is finally coming to an end. Users are no more scammed to using websites based on them being free and offering a way to shutdown one’s own brains. Now they actually have to make money and by proxy it means providing us quality content that is worth that money.
For a few months I’ve been growing more and more frustrated at how Facebook has turned into a generic 4chan-like memespace where my friends’ updates are buried under a ton of random crap (of which most is fake and staged content).
It should also open up the competition. Users have to finally make a conscious choice of where to spend their freetime. There’s also more flexibility through pricing options and focus groups.
Isn’t this what we ultimately want and need to start accepting?
Online services are Not free. Even OSAlert has ads to generate revenue to cover (some of) the costs or, if you don’t want ads, you have to pay up. That’s the deal.
Facebook is the ultimate example of “free” at the point of use, with the cost being your personal information. I’m sure it’s quite a popular opinion here that our personal information is given away to freely to the point it’s just considered normal. But if we don’t start supporting legislation like this (especially from a country that will hold companies to account for breaches) the status quo will continue
Facebook makes an average of $4.85/month in revenue per subscriber. ($117 billion revenue in 2022, currently 2 billion daily active users).
$14/mo sounds excessive, no?