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.
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.
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It’s worth noting that the advertising industry never has had a concept of an untargetted advert. They have always had some marker to target their distribution; be that geographical placement of a billboard, the typical social status of a newspaper’s readership, or the target audience for a tv programme they run ads in. Truly untargetted ads would be effectively useless to an advertiser; nobody in Kolkatta is buying the new American Swiss Cheese from Danone; and nobody in Middle England is buying Japanese tentacle sex toys.
Distribution channel (i.e. a site’s core purpose) is the last untargetted target option; sell sex stuff on porn sites, games stuff on games sites etc. However, when your platform is for everyone, does everything, hosts any kind of content, you have nothing to use.
It is my opinion that the best solution for the average user is to ban cross-site tracking and scraping, but allow content and interaction based advertising within the site. If someone posts on a bunch of maternity groups, advertise them pumps etc. but someone searching that on Google should have the reasonable expectation that clicking on maternitytips.co.nz won’t mean their Facebook feed is full of pumps. I think for most people, that level of profiling is acceptable and, crucially, understandable. They can understand how the data footprint they create impacts what they see. Which is far less intrusive.
That said, Facebook can burn, I left it nearly ten years ago and wouldn’t dream of returning.
Traditional advertising has worked perfectly fine for centuries. In the last 10 years technology has advanced to the point where dragnet surveillance is cheap, and suddenly all the advertisers are chomping at the bit to overpay for “targeted” advertising. Most ads are still only sold based on geographic region, and “demographic data” is proving to be completely useless. Your average social media user will see ads that are completely unrelated to their actual interests.
At best, maybe a “targeted” ad is worth twice as much as a normal ad, but is that worth the hundreds of billions of dollars spent developing that technology, and the loss of privacy for billions of people?
My point I suppose is that traditional advertising hasn’t operated with out a context on which to show ads. There has always been some context, some manner to target an advert at consumers to whom it might be most relevant. The idea that advertisers should see value in an untargetted ad because that’s historically what they bought is wrong, because that’s not something they ever historically bought. So my point boils down to the idea that some sort of targeting has to occur for there to be value in the advertising; and given these are adrev funded platforms, they’ll need that value to exist - however that the scope and scale of data collection is wildly disproportionate to the needs of creating audiences.
The processes by which a user can guard themselves is simply too opaque; the average user can control what they show a platform intentionally (through likes, interactions etc.) but has no concept of how to protect themselves against some cookie farm bullshit selling Facebook the contents of their last three trips to Asda.com. We have three viable options;
- Leave Facebook et al unchecked.
- Ban the concept of targeting advertisements entirely, thus shutting down Facebook, Google, and most free services that the world depends on (because people are very unlikely to pay for these services in enough quantity to keep them running).
- Regulate the concept of targeting advertisements to be fair and equitable for both parties.
However, when your platform is for everyone, does everything, hosts any kind of content, you have nothing to use.
Why can’t you use the content of the page to decide what ads to show? If there’s a Reddit thread discussing games, show gaming ads in that thread and kitchen ads in the threads about cooking. If your front page on Twitter happens to have multiple people writing about traveling, show travel ads. You don’t need to know anything about the users to advertise based on content.
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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
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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.
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
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 super interesting. So ads are possibly only half as effective in Europe?
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 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.
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.
I don’t think it’s just semantics, when many people literally think they’re handing over your data to a third party, when that is not actually the case. That would be significantly more concerning than what they’re doing now, which already is concerning enough.
erm…Cambridge Analytica?
They didn’t sell that data either
True, they just pretty much gave them away
Suddenly Lemmy hosting costs seem really low…
Lemmy isn’t a social network like Facebook though
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Yeah, we don’t need to support greedy capitalists, and also all the extra stuff that comes with being an actual company.
But pixelfed is a social network like Instagram
Social media ≠ social lives.
People need to remember this and not give their social lives to private companies.
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.
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
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.
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 ?
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.
But you/they can still use the free, ad-supported tier like before. I don’t see any change to people who don’t pay.
It just added the option to get rid of ads and trackers in exchange for money.
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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
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I can’t access Instagram unless I agree to the new rules so yes it does affect end users.
What happens to my data if I just leave it like that? Can facebook use it or not?
Instagram doesn’t let you continue unless you choose one of the options.
Same with Facebook, so if I don’t continue and just stop using it now, what about my data?
I assume they can’t use it without my explicit consent, but I don’t know.
Legally they can’t, in reality they probably do. Hell, already did since signing up.
I’ve no idea I haven’t gone back on but I’d like to download all my info and delete… Can’t get back in though. The access they want to your device is too much, they keep access even if you delete the app
I’ve never used any of those media, but honestly; i would find it reasonable to pay IF they would not continue to track you and do all kinds of shady stuff. But now, basically some people will pay and still get their privacy invaded.
unrelated, but why can’t I see a single comment?
Did you pay for them? It’s 12c per comment, or you can buy the whole thread for 70c
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
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!
Glad i left meta a long time ago…
