> Does anybody believe you can use this "one cool trick" to circumvent EU privacy laws?
At least most of the German and French media industries do, and they've been getting away with doing the exact same pay-or-consent thing for years. So it's easy to see why Meta would think it'll work for them as well.
(I think Meta will lose this, but it'll be a good test for whether the laws really are the same for everyone.)
> What if a privacy subscription costs $1000/mo?
That's a weak argument, because it implies that there is a price at which this is OK. I.e. there's no actual principle at stake and we're just haggling about the price.
And if it comes to some price being ok, Meta isn't trying to charge $1k/month like in your thought experiment, but an amount pretty close to what a typical Facebook user in Europe produces in ad revenue. Trying to argue that pricing that just matches e.g. the 80th percentile user is unreasonable seems like a loser.
I am as bothered by the notion of "pay or consent" as you are. But under GDPR, it seems that "pay or else see ads" is unworkable without express giving of consent for the ads option.
Really? If there's no price at which it's ok and it's always equally unreasonable, then why bring price into it at all?
Just to be clear: I think what Meta is doing should be found non-compliant with the GDPR due to consent-or-pay not counting as freely given consent, but it is less of a slam dunk than it should be due to what the newspapers have been allowed to do.
But if that argument fails, complaining about the cost being too high is not going to work as a backup strategy.
While I’m all for privacy, I don’t see why people should not pay for using their apps. Running a platform costs tons of money. Any operator has to make their income from somewhere. In case of FB, it’s through displaying ads; or paying a fee. One can argue the fee is too high and request a reduction. Or quits using the app. The choice always exist. But nothing in this world is free.
Social networking as a fundamental human right? I find the idea ludicrous, but if, then request the governments to build and operate them.
The issue isn’t that Meta is asking for money, but that they’re asking for it in exchange for taking away a right, in a way that is against the law.
And the price they’re asking for is deliberately exorbitant so people will never choose it. Do you truly not see the end game?
It’s like Meta opened a restaurant where they serve food for free and popularised it to the point some families only see each other over those meals. A few years after they hooked everyone we found out they lace the food with drugs, so we make a law saying you can’t do that without consent. To which Meta’s reaction is to introduce a new plan where they will serve you food with fewer drugs in exchange for beating the crap out of you every time you come in.
You have the right to not be served foods with drugs and to not be beaten down. If Meta can’t operate a restaurant without doing either and sustain a business, that is their failure.
It boggles the mind that people defend corporations who exploit their users, giving them a pass to do anything as long as they throw some rancid peanuts on the ground for free.
Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment.
You need to be able to freely choose to not consent “without detriment”. Meta would like to argue the point, but I think it’s pretty clear, and they’ve lost everything so far.
A small correction - this is recital 42, not section 42. The part of the actual text that deals with consent is to be found in Article 7. The part in 7.4 is even broader
* When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.*
The way I interpret that is that requiring consent for tracking / data collection for marketing is pretty much always ruled out since it can never actually be necessary.
It’s absurdly naive to think other ads would not track you. All ad kits out there are tracking you! Ad is all about targeting. Once you agreed for ads, you are tracked, one way or other. But if you paid and they said they will not use your data, but they actual do, then you have all the right to sue them!
Posters, signs and other such ads in the real world exist without tracking. Just because it's more profitable and currently heavily used doesn't mean digital ads can't exist without profiling.
The issue here isn't the ads, the issue here is the profiling. So in that regard Meta is fully allowed to run as many ads as they want, as long as they comply to GDPR (which says nothing about the ability to advertise, only about the ability to use personal/profiling data).
Not disagreeing with your statement (I think there’s a major misunderstanding around privacy and consent underlining all those arguments — and that is somewhat a personal failure) but:
> Posters, signs and other such ads in the real world exist without tracking.
They used to, but many posters now include fairly sophisticated tracking software—in particular the luminous/screen types. We know what it’s like to have paper glued to boards, and that existed in the real world, but it’s not that clear-cut anymore.
Nobody, absolutely nobody said that ever. So the question is why are you asking that question? No, social networks are not a fundamental right. Privacy is. What is so hard to understand about that?
Yes, I find it ridiculous, too. But then tell me how would you run a platform that costs hundred of millions dollars without ads and without fee? Is that also too hard to comprehend?
> But then tell me how would you run a platform that costs hundred of millions dollars without ads and without fee? Is that also too hard to comprehend?
No it isn't hard to comprehend but it isn't relevant here. Privacy doesn't mean no ads and nobody is preventing facebook to require users to pay a fee.
It is similar to organs. It is illegal to sell/buy them. You can still freely give them away(donate them). Privacy is similar to that. You can't buy/sell it but you can freely give it away. In this situation Facebook seems to be trying to sell you your privacy.
Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you'd go bankrupt. Can't say I'm sad about that outcome. Businesses that are only viable if they can violate people's rights don't deserve to exist.
There are services which costs less and provides way more. Meta is just setting an unjustified exorbitant price to drive people off of paid option, that's all.
None of the services I pay costs that much yearly, and sum of top 5 most expensive services I use is still below that amount.
...or they're just an extremely inefficient company, I don't know.
There are plenty of companies running non-targeted ads that are doing just fine, and don't cost millions of dollars to run a year. Facebook wants scale at any cost, and that is unacceptable.
The argument that we have to put up with something we never asked for, but has been carefully integrated into society to be utility-like is disingenuous. I don't want Facebook or WhatsApp, but in the Netherlands they are now used by schools, and even government agencies for communication.
You can't have it both ways: Either you're indispensable (something Facebook has worked very hard to become) and therefore treated as a utility, or you're a private company that can do as they please.
We sadly already created a world where people wants to pay for nothing, and is more or less roped into one subscription after another.
It's not unreasonable for Meta/Facebook to ask for a subscription, if you don't want to be tracked, not that I'd trust them not to. The current fee is set either to avoid having people signup or because settings it at say cost + 10% would reveal that their ads actually doesn't generate that much profit. Meta makes a lot of money on Facebook, but only because of their scale. Individually each European user represents somewhere around €20 per year, ten times less than what Meta is asking. So for €25 you should get not only no tracking, you should get ad-free Facebook.
Meta will never tell us, but how much less would a user be worth without all the tracking?
It seems weird to me that a company would actively hurt their bottom line just because I guess the argument is that they like tracking in the abstract? Like, if you are correct, and Facebook would make more money per user charging them €25 instead of showing them ads, then wouldn't they be idiots to purposefully price their product so high as to "avoid" people making them more profitable? The narrative that Facebook doesn't want to make more money on these users is just really awkward as it would imply the company doesn't have a working profit motive.
Maybe a different explanation is that, sure, on average they make €20 per user per year... but the distribution of how much money they make is extremely lopsided, such as a power law. They want everyone using the platform--even the most unprofitable people--as the service only really makes sense if you can find and communicate with everyone on it... but the people who are most likely to be willing to randomly fork over a bunch of cash to not get tracked are the very kind of person who also are most likely to pay for stuff in general and so facebook in fact might be making 10x as much off these users than people who wouldn't pay for the service at any price?
> Like, if you are correct, and Facebook would make more money per user charging them €25 instead of showing them ads, then wouldn't they be idiots to purposefully price their product so high as to "avoid" people making them more profitable?
Each user that signs up to pay decreases the value of the ones who don’t because it lowers their number. If the price is reasonable and “too many” people sign up, they’re decreasing revenue on the other side. Plus, paying users have a bigger voice in general, in that they can stop paying and you’ll notice. Free users are easier to control as they’ll stick around and accept much more crap.
There are two points there: one is ads and the other is tracking. You could say that ads are based on tracking, true, but ads mean income from other parties. That should be better predictable and better estimable for Meta, making a fairly reliable basis to set the monthly user pricing. But tracking? That's a basis for many future applications which even Meta might not know yet, and giving up on that would mean ruining all those future initiatives. I'm not sure how to put a price tag on that, and I'm not sure they even want to (nor trust them).
IANAL but in some courts the contract has a different penalty/enforcement when money are exchanged between two parties.
So in a way: going to a court the user has more chances of winning when they paid for a service than when using it freely, even if using it freely means they pay with their privacy, when there is a breach of the contract.
Not saying this is what Meta is doing but saying that in some cases it is better to give something away for free than to ask even 1 EUR for it.
I did not consider the possibility that those willing to pay might be the most valuable users, but that might very well be the case.
That does sort of leave the whole business model with a problem where Facebook is an unnecessary middle man for customers who where willing to buy your product anyway. The more you think about it the weirder the model of ad supported services becomes. There is a set of service that is valuable, but not to an extend where we'd want to pay for it.
Around €70 per year seems to be the new number, it has also been clarified that this is revenue, not profit, making it a pretty good indicator of how much Meta needs to charge for Facebook to turn a profit (about four times less than what they are actually charging).
But Facebook aren't really charging 250 Euros either. The actual price they're charging is 9.99 Euros per month, or 120 per year.
The subscription really is priced in line with their ad revenue. It might not be priced in line with the value you're getting from Meta's apps, but it definitely isn't any kind of play to make it intentionally so expensive that nobody would buy it.
Any cheaper, and they'd be basically guaranteed to lose money by offering the subscriptions just due to adverse selection effects. (Frequent users are more likely to subscribe, but also will see more ads.)
Nobody said that. Now, you want to create a fundamental companies right to do whatever they want for revenue. They can't, they'll be shutdown one day, hopefully
Honestly the problem isn't the money. Corporations even offering that choice is an indignity unto itself. Personal information is not currency to pay for services with. There should be no tracking whatsoever whether they pay for the service or not. If they can't run a free service, then they should charge everyone money and compete on a fair marketplace without taking advantage of the scale and reach of a "free" service.
Why charge consumers for products/services when we can charge them for not invading their privacy instead. It seems Meta's free "products" are only worth paying for in order to avoid their ill effects. No wonder they are not sold on the free market. (Zuckerberg once assured people something like "Facebook will always be free". Translation: We know we cannot sell Facebook as a product, no one would pay.)
One wonders if payment can even bind Facebook to refrain from tracking. How is compliance with the terms of this "agreement" monitored. How does anyone even know that Facebook is not still tracking, perhaps through another entity. And of course, Facebook could change the terms anytime. It has a record of ratcheting up the surveilance and ads with further anti-privacy changes.
Facebook tracks people who are not even Facebook users.
Apple CEO claims "privacy is a fundamental human right". Is this just more deceptive marketing. Apple must have some employees living in Europe who use Facebook. What's stopping these "data subjects" from filing complaints against Facebook. That's a question left to the reader.
And obviously they need to know what kind of targeted ads to show you once you decide to stop paying, so the tracking will continue irregardless of any ongoing payment.
Probably there is more: It is also useful to show ads to non-paying friends, valuable to sell to data brokers, and made available to 3-letter agencies.
For an analysis of the graph between users, does a link between two users break when one is paying or both? Don't they even track graphs beyond non-user, e.g., same non-user phone number in two user address books?
Nothing in GDPR gives you legal basis for that (the penalties under GDPR are paid to the state). But there isn't anything that prevents you to sue them either, so you just need to find another legal basis (like, to prove a damage) and convince the civil court. Civil courts have famously low standard (preponderance of evidence), so it doesn't sound easy, but it doesn't sound hard either.
In general case I think it might be hard to sue a company for any fixed amount of money due: it is hard to measure this, and companies are likely to low-ball the figure anyway.
Yet Meta has given a convenient, fixed number here, so perhaps such a lawsuit has a chance to succeed.
An administrative fine to a company because of GDPR violations allows the data subject to use the ruling as a basis for damages in a civil case. Further, emotional damages are allowed, also. And CJEU has reaffirmed there's no "minimum threshold" for damages. A user could claim 1 euro of damages. And there's momentum to make class action-esque "collective redress" a reality, which would be a mechanism with all the pros with class action in U.S., but with much less cons. Imagine 400 million users claiming 100 euros in damages. That's some change to spare for the company.
News outlets based in Europe routinely pull this cookie wall crap. I guess they get a pass for very very principled reasons and not just because they are based in Europe whereas Facebook isn't... /s
Banging Facebook over the head might make Facebook suffer, but it isn't going to create an alternative privacy-conscious social network, or even the incentives to the existence of such an alternative. It's just going to further add cost to a bunch of properties that might have once been dominant and hegemonic, but aren't anymore (hello tiktok) and destroy value that would otherwise have accrued, primarily, to advertisers whose ads now will be much more crappily targeted.
The reason is that they are smaller and if you want to make an example to scare an industry into compliance it's better to go after big companies first. If Facebook gets dragged over the coals the smaller ones are next unless they adapt. This myth that only non-EU companies get pulled into court is nothing but propaganda, mostly spread by the poor, poor, US-based violators of privacy.
> The reason is that they are smaller and if you want to make an example to scare an industry into compliance it's better to go after big companies first.
They've had like five years of large European media companies doing this. That was the time to make an example out of someone, not hope that some even bigger company comes along.
I'm sure there's plenty of local enforcement, I'm just talking about my own cookie wall experience which is mostly happening when consuming Europe-based news outlets. I was really surprised to see that it was enabled by some national agencies which have explicitly okayed the cookie wall for such cases.
> Whether the payment option - e.g. a monthly subscription - is to be regarded as an equivalent alternative to consent to tracking depends in particular on whether users are offered equivalent access to the same service in return for a standard market fee. Equivalent access generally exists if the offers include the same service, at least in principle
Since I got this pop-up I stopped using Facebook. I doubt that this will make a dent in their statistics, but I will still manifest my opposition to their action in the only way I have available to me.
Personally, I would not have a problem with paying for Facebook or Instagram without them abusing my personal data. But the 10€ they are charging is a ridiculous amount that is intended to drive users into opting to have their data used.
I doubt that Meta makes anywhere near 10€ per months with the ads they are showing me. If they can show realistic numbers how much money they own by showing me ads, I am absolutely fine to pay that with a 10% surcharge. I doubt this will be more than 5€ per month.
It was clear this was coming and noyb always seems to be very well prepared for their cases. I'm curious about the outcome.
I'm happy that the GDPR already forced Facebook to offer a no-personalized-ads option, even though I don't really trust them that they don't keep collecting your data for when you cancel the subscription.
I think there's a difficult balance to strike, but paying for not violating your privacy is not. I wish them luck!
With search engines, I get actual value from them knowing what I like — e.g. "mouse" should give me the peripheral not the mammal, and the default YouTube home page if I'm not logged in is 99% irrelevant (sports and music, I don't care about either).
Advert tracking, and anything where they sell on this data, that's where their interests are no longer aligned with mine.
There’s nothing saying that they can’t track based on your preferences. But it needs to be opt-in, and the information processed to do that needs to be only used to do that (i.e. the consent is per functionality). The default is always no processing.
Meta would get away with it if it was "Pay or Okay or [Customize]"
The 'Customize' screen could have lots of power use options for deciding how ads data was used, and sufficiently powerful that the options couldn't be explained without pages of help text, and that choosing "No" or "Yes" to all options made a config with contradictions (ie. "The configuration you have provided requires us to use age data to show you age suitable content, but you have denied us permission to use your age. Please correct your choices before continuing.").
They'd still have the majority of users Pay or Okay, and a tiny minority would go the power user route, and it's existence would keep the EU happy. They'd need to convince the EU that the complexity of the customize screen was necessary due to the inherent complexity of the decisions that need to be made by the user, and not because they want to discourage the users from using it.
I don’t think that’s correct. Consent must be opt-in, informed, and freely given: for cookies many EU countries have decided that a “Disagree” button must be as obvious (or more obvious) than the “Agree” button.
That's a wall of nonsense. Opting out must be just as easy as opting in, it's one of the fundamental rules and "clever" workarounds like the one you describe have been repeatedly struck down.
Noyb has a very good tracking of succeeding with their efforts, as they take pragmatic down-to-the-letter-of-law approach.
They are not activists (there's other orgs for that, like Irish Council for Civil Liberties, which takes much more aggressive approach to privacy rights. Them undertaking these efforts means that it's very likely they'll succeed.
GDPR legal text quite clearly establishes that consent must be freely given. Ultimatums (pay or else) aren't freely given. Also, Meta used their primary color (blue) in the UI modal for "consent" or pay to highlight the "consent". They just can't but not build the case against themselves -- using manipulative UI patterns (priming) to get the choice they want.
A lot of people here argue that access to Facebook/other social media is not a fundamental right. I disagree - when you build something so big (either by accident or by intention) that it becomes humanity's de-facto social fabric, maybe it should be considered a fundamental right.
it was very difficult to make money in the early days of internet (90s, 2000s), so ads* (via tracking) were a quick-and-easy way to make some money. then came social networking, and magnified that* through network-effects ... they got way too comfortable and didn't see it become a major political issue - hence gov regulations and enforcement.
that business model has long gone in my view - new businesses will move in and innovate in that vacuum.
"Not only is the cost unacceptable, but industry numbers suggest that only 3 percent of people want to be tracked – while more than 99 percent decide against a payment when faced with a “privacy fee”."
"Industry numbers suggest 97% of people like free stuff, but 99% decide against paying when faced with the fact that stuff costs money." ... reads like Onion. Companies somehow refuse to become charities; EU should force them, sounds logical.
I think this is utterly ridiculous and a dangerous precedence if allowed, it is asking government to regulate the pricing directly. People can't survive without food, but it doesn't you can sell luxurious fruits?
Facebook/Instagram, are not fundamental rights, nor will it impede one's ability of living without them (I have neither).
No it's not asking government to regulate the pricing. If facebook said "it's 100eur/m or you can't use it at all" (which they'll never say ofc) then there wouldn't be any problems because it's then the price of the product. The way it is implemented now is it's the price of privacy - which might be acceptable in other parts of the world but not in EU.
> One of NOYB's arguments is that cost is too high and thus excludes lower classes unable to pay for the subscription.
Their argument for the price being to high is that Facebook makes about €60 per EU user per year so setting the privacy fee to about €250 seems to be too high. Their argument, the main one, is also that consent should be freely given but if one choice is behind a paywall while the other isn't then the choice isn't freely given.
> Their argument, the main one, is also that consent should be freely given but if one choice is behind a paywall while the other isn't then the choice isn't freely given.
How is it not? Aren't you free to not use the solution?
In the Netherlands, a lot of schools only communicate with parents via Whatsapp messages. How are they supposed to avoid Meta in this kind of situation?
I've personally never touched a Meta product and absolutely never will (and despite this they probably still have a shadow profile of me), but this isn't a simple or even possible decision for a lot of people here.
>Paying for your groceries is the right thing to do, even if you do not want to.
facebook is luring by giving away free groceries and taking pictures of your toes when youre close to sell to toe-loving private customers. thats not a proper way to pay for groceries.
spying and profiling users is not ok, crazy that this is so hard to enter on some dense-skull brains
You could just opt out by using another platform – or better yet, self-host your own instance of Nextcloud, Mastodon, or similar. It's not like you are out of options.
Meta's services are far from essential.
I personally use and prefer Nextcloud, and it's actually better than the mainstream alternatives in some ways. E.g. You do not have to use Apple's notes app if you do not want it. I am tremendously irritated by the proprietary bloat that is being forced down users throats, mainly by companies such as Apple and Microsoft.
But still, why insist on dictating what other website owners and companies should do with their platforms? In our part of the world, I like the idea that this is "for each themself to decide" (at least to an extent). Interoperability and compatibility with other platforms is important to strive for.for security (Apple devices texting Android devices for example, https://www.android.com/get-the-message/).
Undeniably, however, proprietary communication platforms are not really necessary for anyone to use, because free software alternatives exist that are often better and more secure.
> You could just opt out by using another platform – or better yet, self-host your own instance of Nextcloud, Mastodon, or similar. It's not like you are out of options.
I can't believe people still argue this... Cutting off facebook today means that I cut myself off from my families message group, a way to message my grandma (I live abroad) and lose access to pretty much all shops where you have to book online. I've lived in places before where literally everything from finding apartments to events to buying second hand was done through facebook.
Once we have an interoperable standard then we can talk. Right now Facebook has complete domination and you severly hinder yourself in some places by not using it.
> But still, why insist on dictating what other website owners and companies should do with their platforms? In our part of the world, I like the idea that this is "for each themself to decide"
Because certain business models are exploitative and we've decided to ban them as a society.
Those are the rules now, you're welcome to stop doing business in the EU if you can't meet these basic requirements.
The value of Facebook is having a place to connect with all my old aunts and uncles and school friends. A self-hosted Nextcloud is never going to provide that. They're not equivalent in any meaningful way.
> This is almost like complaining that you have to pay for your own groceries in the super market.
Personal information and attention are not currencies to pay for services with. Your entire business model needs to be declared illegal and dismantled.
They want the authorities to enforce laws. If the authorities (and eventually the courts) rule that what Meta does is lawful, they will have to accept that, but as of now there is controversy around that.
It's Meta's duty to find a working business model in accordance with laws, not Noyb's.
You can get privacy without paying by not using Facebook. Getting someone to host your pictures and provide you a platform to share them isn't a fundamental right.
I’d agree if Facebook wasn’t such a monopoly. Most digital social interactions are walled behind Meta products.
You want to organize a protest? Create a Facebook event. You want to keep up with news in your town or neighborhood? Join the local Facebook group. You want to chat with someone? Add them on Facebook Messenger.
Paying for groceries with privacy is not only possible, it's extremely common. That's the entire concept of a membership card (at stores which will sell to the general public).
Thing with discount cards is that they track you when you buy something and thats it. But you cant get 10$ discount in exchange for retailer getting a right to track all your web browsing and profiling you using that information. And EU is fighting this.
That's a different situation IMO. The data is constrained to what I buy from them, and my understanding under the GDPR is that they can't share it with anyone else (at least I never gave permission for that).
I can use the store and not flash my membership card if I don't want them tracking a particular purchase.
This option doesn't exist with Facebook, you can't opt in and out from click to click. And they share the information with any number of outside parties.
Furthermore the charge that Facebook is levying vastly exceeds the value of the information they're forgoing if I pay them.
> I can use the store and not flash my membership card if I don't want them tracking a particular purchase.
You might have more trouble than that. Did you use a payment card for the secret purchase? Have you ever used the same card while providing your membership information?
Your comparison is quite disgusting and grotesque of course, but let os ignore that for a moment and address the false idea that users are "paying with their privacy"; such opinions is probably the result of a number of logical fallacies.
There is no exchange going on, quite literally, and users get a service, basically for free. Whatever definition you make up to describe the business model does not change this fact.
In addition, so-called tracking is not the problem in itself, and especially so since users are anonymized. It is things like political misinformation and resulting manipulation that is problematic – not targeted ads themselves.
Risks continue to be profoundly exaggerated, and people, even those in the know, seem bend on propagating such misinformation. Please, let's stick to a factually based discussion.
Derailing the discussion with grotesque and perverted irrelevant comparisons of organ trading is not helpful.
OK, I have a better comparison: companies are not allowed to give away rotten food for 0€, and talk bollocks like "we give you a choice to pay for the fresh one". They need to dispose of it to make sure no-one attempts to eat it, even hungry people in poverty who have trouble to get the food in other ways.
Because getting free food is not a fundamental right either, isn't it?
Personal data is a toxic asset. It also needs to be disposed of.
My attention is mine. It's part of my mind's inalienable cognitive functions. And yet you would sell it over to the highest bidder for profit without my consent. I call what you're advocating for mind rape.
> There is no exchange going on, quite literally
Total bullshit. If there was no exchange, Meta wouldn't be offering users a "Pay or Okay" take it or leave it deal. The mere existence of this thread is evidence of the fact they were extracting value from people's personal information and attention. The existence of an alternative is evidence of the existence of the other exchange.
Nobody’s complaining about Facebook’s use of ads as its primary income stream. Hell, the complaint isn’t even about targeted ads. The complaint is specifically around the pervasive tracking that goes hand in hand with this particular form of targeting.
> First they complain about targeted ads, then they complain about offering an alternative.
Yes. I complain. Because I don't want a pay-or-be-targeted world. I'd rather then not have the services. And I have absolutely no problems with that meaning (for example) that a huge fraction of the web's "free" services and sites just disappeared. Or huge companies like Facebook either tanked or left the EU. Zero. None. I applaud this (noyb + the EU regulations) because I think it's the right way to go. That is: I think it's better to effectively outlaw entire branches of the online ecosystem, than to end up with pay-or-be-tracked.
Would anonymization change your mind? I am not saying it should be required, because I do not think that personally. But, anonymization with sufficient entropy should presumably invalidate any argument someone might have against targeted ads, and at the same time allow website owners to pay their employees salleries, while covering server costs. Etc.
It seems Google is also working on making the "tracking" more or less client-side, in the browser, which should also measure into considerations in these discussions.
Regardless, in public spaces. E.g. Streets, restaurants, banks, I expect increased surveillance is more or less inevitable, and in the future, AI will also be leveraged to track people. There is a slight double standard in all this, because people are demonizing online tracking while tolerating tracking and surveillance in the physical world. Or, worse, they are simply flat against tracking, ignoring the necessity of it.
Let us say, even if Meta offered a completely ad-free experience, your data would still sit on their servers, and by definition you would still be tracked even when opted out. The only difference would be that your data would not be used to target you with ads. That is a pretty whimsical accomplishment imo.
Offering a service devoid of tracking is close to being a physical impossibility with current technology. Not even decentralization would sufficiently destroy your unique signature while using the internet, and you would not want it to, because if it did, it would also be hard for others to trust that you are the person you claim to be.
Political parties and governments could use your data against you, and even data collected by companies. Potentially political entities could use this for malicious purposes, and that is personally something I am more concerned about than tracking itself (or being shown targeted ads by individual companies for that matter).
To be clear it’s not “tracking” in the “tracking cookie” sense that is a problem. It’s the treading of PII with third parties. For example for use in ad-budding. I don’t mind meta knowing everything about me that I have told them or using that to show me ads from their own servers where no information reaches a third party.
It's strange this doesn't really talk about the option that millions of people have taken of simply not using Facebook.
Max Schrems: “Fundamental rights are usually available to everyone. How many people would still exercise their right to vote if they had to pay € 250 to do so? There were times when fundamental rights were reserved for the rich. It seems Meta wants to take us back for more than a hundred years.”
If meta offers facebook in the EU, then according to law, people have a fundamental right to use it without personalised advertising. Meta has the fundamental right to pull out of the EU completely and shake their fist at the sky if they disagree.
Idea is that facebook can give free access to its platform or they can choose to ask for payment, but they can not accept as a payment that users would wave their right to privacy. Privacy cant be for sale like you cant (legally) sell your kidney.
Not a fundamental right, but a fundamental part of many peoples lives, at least here in Norway. Do you have children in school? Part of a local club? And so forth.
In many situations, there are no alternatives if you want to participate in society. This is of course outrageous, but non the less a reality. I have managed to stay of Metas products since 2018, but I do not have children :)
No, it's the other way around. Either FB offers something that aligns with the law, or they GTFO. Why it's the me(g|t)acorp that sets rules and not elected governments? Because it's their product? Because we the people are the product and not people?
Good, so EU can go and ban Facebook operating in EU straight up, not dancing around privacy.
The EU protectionism around internet service is due to its lack of competitiveness in the whole internet economy. Or they might just outright start this trade war with US, and see how it goes.
What you're saying is thay exploitation is profitable for the exploiters, making them more "competitive" on the world stage. All I can say in response is that so was slavery.
x restaurant will only let you eat if you show your bank account details beforehand "to make sure youll be able to pay afterwards". obviously you wont go to that restaurant, but maybe thats the workplace restaurant (environment forces you to use it).
did facebook require your salary level before signing up? Also it is not like buffet doesn't ask for your email/phone number to register in order to get in line, they do.
yeah but in my example they dont make you pay beforehand: they want to know how much do you make, how much you spend, what places you spend on... is an example of being forced to comply with abusive clausules
The main thing you're missing is that Facebook is the big corporation the GDPR was largely written to try and reign in AND that any judgement affecting Facebook is going to have downstream effects on other providers (there's been a few news sites trying the scheme in Europe too). This is gonna be the "do or die" for the pay-or-okay scheme. Given Facebook is doing it, I wouldn't put my chances on the "do" part; they are the extreme example and EU judges don't tend to look kindly on big corporations thinking they're capable of "outsmarting" their laws.
Is right to privacy while using Facebook services a fundamental right? Well, given some of the services they own - maybe they should be. WhatsApp is massive in the EU, while Instagram seems to be the replacement for Twitter for a lot of people now that Twitter itself is flooded with fools that nobody likes to interact with. We've already had Facebook suprise drop a "EULA change" on WhatsApp users that let them use WA data in the Facebook algorithms. The specific field Facebook is even in makes it unusually hard to leave. It's somewhat socially acceptable to not have a Facebook account. Its less acceptable to not have an Instagram and I don't think you can function in west-european society without WhatsApp at the moment; basically everyone expects you to have it.
So yes, privacy when using Facebook is extremely important (GDPR literally exists to codify privacy as a right) and pay-or-okay is holding it hostage.
I agree with the gist of your reply, but I object to this part:
> It's somewhat socially acceptable to not have a Facebook account. Its less acceptable to not have an Instagram and I don't think you can function in west-european society without WhatsApp at the moment; basically everyone expects you to have it.
I can assure you that it is perfectly viable to live a normal life in a west-european society without using any Meta product. It gets a bit more difficult if you have kids at school, though, with teachers and parents not being flexible.
If you mean anything to your friends they will use one of the multiple other ways to notify you.
A library that is exclusively using a social media platform for announcements is doing it wrong and complaining or even suing might help.
While I agree with you, it’s substantially different between countries. WhatsApp is pretty much unused in Sweden, while Facebook is basically a necessity.
> is that Facebook is the big corporation the GDPR was largely written to try and reign
Actually GDPR text was largely written before shitting on Facebook became the cool kids thing.
The text was adopted by European Parliament in 2014. In 2011, EDPS publishes an opinion on political wants towards GDPR. It's very likely the text becomes written circa 2012-2013. That's waaaaay before any general public's disgruntlemnt with Facebook or any Big Tech giants. The public opinion against Big Tech starts to shift around 2015, after CJEU decides the so called "Google Spain" case (users being allowed to remove their search results from search engines). For reference, Cambridge Analytica story gets broken in 2018.
It is very likely that if GDPR was to be introduced today, the legal text would be much stricter and harsher. We need to realize that GDPR is a general data protection law. It does not prescribe industry-specific measures. It is written to apply to a bread baker so much as it is written to apply for a Big Tech giant. And that means race to the bottom in terms of legal standard.
> Facebook is the big corporation the GDPR was largely written to try and reign in
As I understand it, GDPR was to keep all the different EU member states' rules on the same page and up to date, and was continuing the same path that had already been stated with the Data Protection Directive in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive
Most of the core ideas were already present before Zuckerberg finished[0] high school.
[0] and possibly started, but I don't know how US schools work.
That, I suppose, is why ad-companies typically invest in anonymization. It may not be perfect, but it is good enough in terms of reaching an acceptable balance between respecting privacy and someone being able to monetize an app or a website imo.
Anonymization of data is largely impossible. That's an opinion of many data protection experts. Combining datasets, using open-source data from gov't sources and likes allows to "single out" individuals in no time. Further, what industry does is largely pseudonimization, not anonymization. Anonymized data is not under the scope of GDPR, whereas pseudonymized data is.
GDPR does not allow discrimination against users who do not want to be tracked and you have the right not to be tracked. Wether the workaround ,that makes €10 then‘ is viable has not yet been tested in the courts. General assumption is that it is not. This would result in facebook to either allow non-sanctioned opt-out or pull out of the EU.
FB is basically daring Europe to enforce their laws. I hope the entire concept of paying for privacy gets shut down hard.