this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

First they manipulate their algorithms so that small businesses lose almost all visibility... Except when buying ads.

Now this?

Does that actually mean businesses won't even reach their potential customers with paid ads anymore?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

$14 a month is insanely. maybe 1 dollar a month is reasonable. given they'll still be working their ads into 80% of the bullshit that is Facebook feeds.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds great. I stopped using Facebook years ago. This can only bring their demise faster.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

So you give them $14 and hope, they don't sell your data? I never had a facebook/whatsapp account and never will and I know why.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They seem to have copied the approach from multiple European newspapers that consists to disable tracking if you subscribe. And unfortunately most data protection agencies seem okay with that.

It infuriates me that you have to pay for the basic right to not be tracked, given that you already have to be particularly tech-literate to avoid tracking by yourself...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I find it a tough one, because they offer a product/service that costs a fortune to maintain and operate, and if they can't make money from your data then what do they do? Not having your data harvested is just a side-benefit of paying for the thing you use a dozen times per day.

If they couldn't use your data or charge then it would shut down.

You wouldn't run a business at a 100% loss.

I don't understand why people think digital things should all be free.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Not being tracked doesn't mean they can't have ads.

TV ads are still a thing and so are billboard ads.

They could simply show ads depending on the context of the content you're looking at.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You can serve ads without any of the invasive tracking, and you can have paid access without any of the invasive tracking...

I don't think most people actually think digital things should be free, just that they're not invasive data-hoarding piles of crap.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Ad targeting should just be banned outright. It serves noone and creates huge pools of easy to abuse data.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

frog in a boiling pot

This shit gets any hotter I just might hop out

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

He really wants to sink that ship, doesn't he?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Here I should say that you can always donate money to good services like lemmy, mastodon, peertube or important organizations like FSF, EFF.org(if you are in USA), Linux Foudation, X.org(wayland is part of it too).

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Could you EU people turn that around and charge fuckzuck 14 euros for every month you've kept your account, as that's the apparent value of your profile?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I am not convinced this gets them off the hook. But I'll assume he has better lawyers than me. What it does show, is the value of forcing people to provide data to provide personalized ads.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Are they going to stop allowing people to edit their own interests too? What's the difference between not allowing personalization, and regularly clearing out their "collection" of your perceived interests?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

No joke that would be great for privacy and putting users first. Users would go the product to the customers and the platform would actually need to cater to them.

The same would happen with Twitter.

Now, social media depends on its massive size, so even if makes the platform more user-centric, it would reduce the amount of users and reduce its value.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I feel like this is short-sighted on Meta's part. Since it sounds like they will still serve paid users non-personalized ads, I think they'd be better off losing a little revenue on those users who actually make the effort to turn off ad personalization. Otherwise they are going to lose users over this which is going to make Facebook just that much less relevant for the people who are willing to use it with personalized ads or pay to ONLY get non-personalized ads.

Part of the reason that their service is popular is that it has huge market share. Every time they shave off a segment of their user base Facebook becomes that much less relevant for everyone.

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