Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time From November, it will be possible to pay Meta to stop shoveling ads in your Instagram or Facebook feeds and slurping your data for marketing purposes so long as you live in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland. Campaigners have long wanted to put a price on a user's data, and Meta appears to have done just that. If you want to use its …
I have an account, had it for almost as long as the network exists, but have moved away from it a few years ago. FB and Insta are bad for my mental health, I actually lost sleep over posts that upset me.
I'm still on Reddit, but that's the only social network I still visit. Much easier to avoid toxic content on there, I don't have the same issue as with Meta's networks.
Maybe I am a simpleton but just had does paying Zuck money get your privacy back?
It's very easy. Even for your simple mind. Zuckerberg promises not to track you or collect/sell your information on. And of course you trust and believe him don't you? Don't you? Whyever not?
Don't worry. When his sudden, but inevitable, betrayal is finally revealed - a hapless software engineer will be conveniently blamed for the "bug" or "problem with the algorithm" - and all will be well again.
Now just hand over your money peasant!
I'm the same, although I also have a PiHole at home and that puts a blanket ban on all known Meta domains.
My daughter came to visit and complained that the Internet wasn't working. I checked, all fine. Then she said, that she couldn't view Instagram, I told her, Internet working as expected. :-D
IANAL, but I think context will be all here. It will need to be abundantly clear to users what they are opting for and what will happen to their personal data.
Any language that obfuscates the nature of data collection in the hope that people will say "well, I'm not paying that" and click on "consent" instead is unlikely to pass muster.
It does sound like they've recruited Baldrick to head up their Cunning Plan department. At least Clegg will now have an intellectual equal.
It's already slurped. They themselves are on record saying they don't really what they do with the data they collect or who where it goes.
82. Why does not the Zuck empty his profiles, for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the users that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of users for the sake of miserable money with which to build a Website? The former reasons would be most just; the latter is most trivial.
Some of it is entitlement, but most of it is just that most people don't realize how much data about them Meta collects, or how valuable it is, or how harmful targeted advertising can be.
There is also the problem that there are services that should have nothing to do with Meta, but in practice rely on Meta as an infrastructure, effectively forcing you to have a Meta account in order to interact with them. For example, some small businesses only publish fresh information on Facebook and leave their website to neglect; also, way too many people and businesses rely on WhatsApp; local schools use Meta services for students, teachers and parents; and so on, and so forth.
This is not technically Meta's fault, but it's also not the end users' fault, and it's excessively difficult to convince a school that they should not use WhatsApp groups. Because, see above, they don't know how harmful unchecked data collection is.
@Filippo
"Some of it is entitlement, but most of it is just that most people don't realize how much data about them Meta collects, or how valuable it is, or how harmful targeted advertising can be."
How valuable is it? Barely over 30 cent per person? I am not sure how harmful targeted advertising is, first it isnt particularly good and second it is an extension of the targeting when people buy magazines/newspapers.
"There is also the problem that there are services that should have nothing to do with Meta, but in practice rely on Meta as an infrastructure, effectively forcing you to have a Meta account in order to interact with them. For example, some small businesses only publish fresh information on Facebook and leave their website to neglect; also, way too many people and businesses rely on WhatsApp; local schools use Meta services for students, teachers and parents; and so on, and so forth."
I would suggest that the latter disproves your starting premise. You say these services have nothing to do with meta except then they rely on meta as the platform to provide the service. You may dislike that they rely on meta but these services obviously rely on meta.
"This is not technically Meta's fault, but it's also not the end users' fault, and it's excessively difficult to convince a school that they should not use WhatsApp groups. Because, see above, they don't know how harmful unchecked data collection is."
And the parents can refuse to use it. And if they miss out that is the price of the individuals freedom to choose not to use something. You can try to educate the school (I would agree with you) but it is quick and easy and provides the infrastructure the school needs and frees up the schools time and resources for other things.
No, that's what Facebook will charge per person.
That EUR10/month is considerably higher than the value FB will get from a regular person through its other channels - just look at YouTube Premium. The UK's CPM (Cost per thousand impressions, the initialism uses the French word for thousand for some reason) averages out to $13.75 so far in 2023, so an individual ad view can be calculated to a value of $0.1375. That revenue is split 50/50 between the content owner and YT, so we get a value per UK ad view of about seven US cents.
UK YT premium is £10/month, currently $12.24 with exchange rates - that means YT/content owners make more money from somebody who has YT premium and doesn't see about 170 ads per month than they would from somebody without YT premium. That's a heavy user who probably averages 30-60 minutes of YT content consumption per day. Extremely heavy users (like yours truly) benefit from the flat model but I'm probably in the minority.
You're confusing price with value. €120/year is what they think the market will bear. Clearly it's priced in line with similar media subscriptions, which is cheeky as hell because they don't produce their own content nor pay proper content producers to do so (token monetisation of annoying clickbaity shorts to draw you into their ads clearly not counting).
But this is what happens when a company is allowed to develop a monopolistic position in the market. What we should really be worried about is the way Whatsapp is becoming the new de facto international phone system..
"For example, some small businesses only publish fresh information on Facebook and leave their website to neglect;"
This is a particular problem with many community groups (who may not have a website at all). Even if their Facebook page can be viewed without an account, if you want to contact them it's often 'via Facebook Messenger' with no email address offered as an alternative. Wonder how many people lose interest at this point? I certainly do!
@43300
"if you want to contact them it's often 'via Facebook Messenger' with no email address offered as an alternative. Wonder how many people lose interest at this point? I certainly do!"
Unfortunately not enough. I too prefer an email or phone number and will grudgingly use an 'online chat' feature on a website. But for those without the resources and knowledge to maintain other methods facebook has done a good job at making themselves attractive to both marketers and customers. To my disappointment too.
Well, this action may improve the situation. As Facebook lose significant numbers of users, the people trying to use Facebook for anything other than just unimportant chat will no doubt add a contact email address at least. Even losing 10% of your customers will cost most small businesses a noticeable amount.
"But for those without the resources and knowledge to maintain other methods facebook has done a good job at making themselves attractive to both marketers and customers."
Maybe, but in days gone by there was frequently someone involved in a group who had enough basic HTML skills to put together simple websites - I know I did a few in the early 2000s, and at the time I was a student doing a degree in something completely unrelated to computers. All that's largely gone now, with the expectation that everyone needs to be able to leave their comments everywhere! It then goes beyond the stage of basic static HTML pages.
it's not only small business, it's schools and such. They get their funding cut, they search for cuts themselves. And then, 'everybody's shocked' when google and others want to charge for previously FREE!!! 'educational' features. The real culprit is the 'system', that's outsourced costs to improve its balance books, and at some point, down the line, SOMEBODY's got to pick up the bill, guess who.
This page claims that Facebook has annual revenues of $116.8bn (in 2022), of which $54.5 billion is generated in US & Canada, despite only 13% of users being based in that region.
This page says there are 208.6m active users in North America (*)
That implies the value of each North American user is 54.5bn / 208.6m = $206 per year.
If Europe is similar, then €120 per year seems quite reasonable to displace that revenue.
Of course, another question is whether it *costs* anything like €120 per user per year to provide the service - and I'd guess the profit margin is substantial (compared to the cost of running, say, a shared Mastodon server - although content moderation costs are hard to estimate)
(*) However I also see it claimed that there are 3bn active users worldwide, and 13% of that is 390 million. If true, that brings the revenue down to $140 per user per year.
And, of course, don't forget to take into account all that other data they collect and link to individuals who don't actually subscribe to facebook but still get tracked all over the place and probably linked to real identities via actual Facebook members posting and tagging photos of friends and family, the so-called "shadow profiles", which they can also monetise by selling to ad brokers etc.
>So how do most people think Meta make loads of money
They don't. Think about it, I mean. I don't blame them too much. The possibility of "being the product" is very recent in our society, at least on this scale. I don't think our culture has internalized it yet. Talking about it helps.
"most of it is just that most people don't realize how much data about them Meta collects, or how valuable it is, or how harmful targeted advertising can be."
A few years ago I did a back-of-the-envelope estimate of how much revenue a user's data brings to Google based on their revenue and number of users, IIRC it was around $100 / user / year. I'd guess it's in the same ballpark for Facebook. So at the proposed pricing, they would make even more money from 'subscribers' than ad-paid users. And of course, elephant in the room there is that their services actually *cost* much less, they could probably keep the lights on at around $30-40 / user / year, the rest is going to a bunch of research vanity projects and gigantic profits.
But maybe it's good that users actually start to understand that none of these 'free' services is really free. When users believe it's free, they wouldn't pay for a privacy-first, no-lock-in federated open-source solution where multiple compatible networks can interconnect in a way that a user can see all other users without needing to be on the same network. Once you're at a point where users are ready to pay $10/mth for Facebook, they can also look around and decide they are willing to pay $5/mth for a better alternative (ie it opens up possibilities for new startups in the area).
You would be forgiven for thinking this is all a bit topsy-turvy. Meta is expecting a substantial amount of cash from users for not slurping their data for marketing purposes, which seems to be at odds with the spirit of rulings from regulators, if not some of the actual words.
Nah, it's a well-established and historical business model. Pay me $160 and your windows won't get broken. Pay me $160 and I won't install cameras and microphones in your bedroom. Pay me $160, and your personal & private data won't get collected and sold.
Seems rather like extortion to me. I have no business or contractual relationship with FaceMelta, and I don't knowingly use any of their services. I don't have any contract with them to supply services, especially any services I have no wish to provide, like my personal information or browsing habits. So it seems a little odd that the only way I stop them doing something they shouldn't be doing is to pay them. Not that I have any faith or trust that paying the extortion fee would stop them hoovering up the data anyway, especially given all the stalking and spying junk that FaceMelta still spew across every website and service they can. Presumably the only way this could work is some internal version of 'Do Not Stalk' cookie that automagically deletes the data for anyone who's signed up for this protection racket.
"Not that I have any faith or trust that paying the extortion fee would stop them hoovering up the data anyway"
Nor do I have any faith that if I pay them anything, all my user history will be completely deleted, and I'm pretty sure they would still collect data about interactions paying users have with non-paying users
"Pay me $160 and your windows won't get broken. Pay me $160 and I won't install cameras and microphones in your bedroom. Pay me $160, and your personal & private data won't get collected and sold."
Possibly not the best examples, since it seems people are willing to pay Microsoft to buy broken Windows, pay Amazon, Google and others to buy spy cameras/microphones to willingly install in the bedroom and elsewhere and even sites you subscribe to still collect every bit of data they can "to improve the service". It's not that easy to think of some sort of criminal extortion racket that hasn't been "mainstreamed" by business to get user to willingly hand over cash and data for something they'd ordinarily run a mile from. Even ransomware has been mainstreamed. It's called "cloud lock in". Keep paying or lose you data. Blackmail might still be unique to the criminal world, but I bet someone reading here can point to an example of mainstream, legalised blackmail :-)
Saw something about this a day or two ago... and my first thought was that it was an onion argument and/or a hoax as it's done the rounds many times over the years... I can remember fake posts/stories about (insert social media site here) was going to start charging you to use it going back 10yrs or more.
Doesn't bother me at all... I deleted FB about 12yrs ago, deleted twatter about 5-6yrs ago. I do everything I can to block their ads/trackers/scripts (same with others)... I might not get it all, but I make what they do get as useless as possible.
I'm happy that my entire social media presence is on mastodon, it's peaceful, friendly and inclusive and so far... without the hate because when you get attempts by far right groups to 'infiltrate' with their own 'instance'... they just get defederated by all of the others. It's quite funny to watch.
No, it's more of a 'forum' and those have been about for decades more than social media... so for me at least they're not part of the toxic entity that has become 'anti-social media'
Although... there are a few reg commentards that do their best to be toxic wankers.... but I'll mention no names. :)
anything that gives you an option to share your enlightened views and get interaction online is, to some extend, 'social media'. For some projects, lke the Register it's a nice (but not unimportant) add-on to drive people to their platform for others, like facebook, etc. this interaction is at the core of their business. But, in effect, there's no difference between the register and facebook, whether you supply information yourself, and people add the lively element, or whether you supply just empty shelves which people fill in, ultimately, your goal is to attract audience so you can make profit. After all, we're talking about business, do we not? How you make your money is just... a detail, this or that business approach.
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There was quite a heated debate recently about people getting the latest COVID booster being infected by a "bill Gates" tracker. The number of believers in conspiracy theories put out by the likes of Alex Jones and DJTrumpo and his cult that get new converts is astounding almost 4 years since COVID became a thing (or was released on the orders of Faucci/Biden from the Wuhan Lab...). Yep is sounds crazy but people believe almost anything these days.
Then... a recent study showed that 48% of Americans get their news ONLY from Social Media. It is little wonder that the US is going to pot rapidly?
I don't have much of a problem being shown ads. They can get annoying, and if they are too annoying I'll probably decide to use a different site or block them. But I don't think showing me ads on an ad-supported website is unethical.
The big problem I have is with data gathering. In today's world, ads and data gathering are pretty much impossible to disentangle, but that's a deliberate choice on the side of the ad brokers. It's by no means a necessity. I wish lawmakers would act to break that.
You trust your friends ?
And their friends ?
And so on ?
Eventually Facebook will come across your email address. (As will TwitteX, et al). Then it silently logs it and waits to see it again.
You would be amazed (or scared) how quickly it can workout where all the people who haven't signed up are. And what they like.
Meanwhile a fake profile I created 15 years ago is still alive and getting recommendations of people it apparently knows (see also: LinkedIn). Which means I would take any statement about real users with a mine of salt.
No. You misunderstood my point. Assume the address I give my friends is fred@fred.com. I know they will pass it around more than I wish they did but the point is that *I* never use that on any site on the Internet.
So FB may work out a lot of stuff about fred@fred.com. But as I am using joe@joe.com on my discussions of my broken drill bits collecting hobby, and weevil@weevil.com on Netflix, nobody can correlate those three to determine they are the same person. And neither of those can feed me ads based on what my friends have leaked.
Which is why *all* my web access is via a proxy - that runs on different cloud servers each day. Sure it took a few days to get it working but I have been using it for many years now.
Lambda-based http proxies also exist, which can make every individual http request appear to come from a different IP address, anywhere in the world. As does Tor, of course, but exit nodes are sometimes blocked.
Facebook has a 'virtual you' even if you've never been on the site. It has your name, your age, your date of birth, your national ID(s), your bank accounts, your bank transactions, your credit card transactions, your house history, your car history, your family relationships. Any time you've filled out a form with your info (or your family member does), they've got it. It buys those from third parties in bulk. There is absolutely nothing you can do about that. And then of course it has all the social links - based on shared emails, uploaded photos, etc. Your hidden email helps a little there, but let's be honest, they can probably figure it out anyhow. Facebook is a giant evil vampire squid with 7 billion arms and the best you can do is block their ads and not deliberately contribute to their information by not posting on their sites.
Unless my bank, doctor, employer(s) or HMRC (& other govt bodies that have legit need for accurate data)have been flogging my details nowhere has my DOB.
.. You never use your real DOB online.
Similarly NI number, bank account details, car details - never used that data outside of mandatory gov web pages (don't do any form of online banking as benefits not worth the potential risks )
Of course it may be that someone has "tagged" me on a photo, shared contacts so email address & phone number shared (but email address friends & family have is different to the various email addresses I use online,(generally have unique one per site so I can easily find who has been flogging email address to spammers, though also sometimes use a general "disposable / black home" email address that never gets used for anything other than sites that need an email address to access & will most likely never be used again ))
Needless to say don't use FB, Insta etc.
Obviously I am more cautious with my PII than the average person (e.g. still use "bricks & mortar" stores, pay with cash (instead of card) as often as possible etc.).
.. But there will be some of us where Meta has a fight on their hands to get some useful data
There's also the not-so-little problem that I do not trust Meta to actually do what it says.
They have been fined by the EU, multiple times, and each time they only changed the least bit necessary... not to comply with the law, but just to force the infraction procedure to restart from scratch.
I used WhatsApp until shortly after it was bought by Meta, at which point I asked them to delete my account. My personal phone number still appears as a WhatsApp user today, even though I have sent them a certified mail asking for deletion of my data under GDPR. This is in blatant violation of the law, but at this point there's nothing I can do without hiring a lawyer. And even if I did that, the best I could hope for would just be for people to stop finding me on WhatsApp - but there is no way I could be certain they actually deleted my data and all backups. So, kinda pointless.
They have repeatedly proven that they cannot be trusted with my privacy even when compelled by the law. Assuming I wanted to use their services, and I don't, why should I believe that paying them would work? Most likely, they'll take the money, slurp my data anyway, and just make sure my account doesn't make it obvious to me.
I'll consider this again if the EU makes it clear that the maximum GDPR penalties - something that actually hurts - are on the table, and that someone will be actively watching for compliance. Until them, I'd recommend not falling for this.
So if I pay I wont get my data used to show me targeted ads, nothing says they wont show you ads, they also don't say my data will not be collected and used to show others targeted ads, or used for anything else they want to use it for. If I don't pay they will collect my data and use it to show me me targeted ads, and what ever else they want to use it for.
I'm not a legal expert but I don't think that not paying a subscription is consenting to my data being collected and used to show me targeted ads. Guess it will be back to the courts with this
They don't work if you access Facebook via the app, which is what most people do. They also won't stop the most prevalent type of "ad" on Facebook, the sponsored post. Adblockers don't have any way to block those because they come from the same place as the posts you do want to see.
Heck I'm not sure if Facebook shows any "traditional" ads, it might all be sponsored post type stuff rather than random banner ads like most sites.
Yes but what they make from advertising or what they would make from subscriptions is revenue not profit (income only, not income-expenses). Meta's 2022 revenue was $116bn, and you can be sure that the 3bn active users figure is an inflated one for some weird definition of 'active'. They're making probably north of 50 bucks/user, possibly way more. Either way though, $10/mth is excessive and insulting, it's deliberately setting the subscription price so high that the current model looks far more attractive, because that's the model they know and love (ugh!).
With 3 billion users Facebook is going to have a lot of them that don't have much disposable income - i.e. aren't worth much to advertisers. The EU no doubt has higher average disposable income than the average worldwide Facebook user, so they have to charge more.
Combine that with Facebook wanting to replace lost revenue ($120 billion or $40/year) not lost profit (because they still have to pay as much to service that user whether they see ads or not) and that $10/month is probably not far from the revenue they collect per EU user.
Last time I saw anything related to the value of a users data, it was priced higher than a barrel of oil... that's to each advertiser... everything they hold on 2 billion or so people valued at about $100 for each user... as oil is about $90 a barrel at the moment
I have no idea if it's worth as much now... I've not bothered looking into it further.
I actually think this is a good idea. In that it is not unreasonable for a company providing a service to profit from it, either by ads or subscription fee. I suggested twitter go that way years ago, but that's another story.
But... I wouldn't trust facebook to actually do it. And I would fully expect that when they are caught 'a rogue engineer' or 'a coding error' happened, that meant the user's data would have been 'unintentionally' collected.
*if implemented ethically
I'll bet $5 that no matter what anyone pays FB, they still track every click, keystroke word you mention. Yeah that FB app on your phone - requires access to your personal Email and phone book, requires you to give up other peoples PII to use their service. No chance that paying them (same as ransomware criminals) means they won't abuse your data.
Meta claim ~115 billion dollars of ad revenue.
They also claim 3.6 billion users.
So that's a relatively simple sum - Ad free should cost at *most* $32 a year, and since they don't have to store or serve those ads it should probably be less.
Either that or they will be losing $10/month - $120 a year and they've actually got less than a billion users, so they're lying to their customers.
Facebook haven't provided a service for years. It's only even vaguely usable with fbpurity and an ad blocker in usage, and the timeline is still broken.
Until they provide a non algorithmic timeline that isn't driven by their interests rather than mine, have *proper* discussions (threaded, none of this 'most liked, I'm going to hide everything else'), an app that doesn't try to suck every iota of information it possibly can, and a design that works effectively on lower powered devices why should I pay money?
I do pay money for services that are worth it. Facebook isn't.
"I wonder why the UK is excluded?"
The UK is not included because we elected to leave the EU Cartel ....... remember BREXIT !!!
Not being part of the EU Cartel we are too small to be of concern.
The chances of any laws being enacted that would actually be of concern to Meta et al are close to Zero !!!
Our politicians have shown themselves to be so selfserving and venal that there is little to fear !!!
:)
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Hide or flag all the ads every time you use Facebook. After about 1000 or so are hidden, their ad engine starts failing. Soon it's completely ad-free. I'm guessing it has a very short query deadline to prevent overloads.
Facebook responded by e-mailing me all the ads and refusing to let me change my e-mail address. Deleting my account was the sensible fix.
Personally, I dislike Facebook. I have an account that I very very rarely use. But, apart from the good citizens around here, that seems to be a minority opinion. The vast majority of people cannot get enough of it, liking, sharing, posting pics of thier lunch etc.
Of course it's a data slurping monster, but even when you tell people, they mostly don't care - they just want to get back to the funny cats.
So Facebook provides a service, if you can call it that, that is wildly popular, for no upfront cost, and manages to make a massive profit. Well, good for them. Absolutely nobody is forced to use Facebook; the argument that it
is sometimes the only way to contact businesses is invalid - if the business is so poor at communication, they don't deserve the custom of those who don't want to use Facebook. Not that that will bother the business one bit - you go where your customers are, and clearly the majority of them are on Facebook.
I do not see why Facebook should have to run their "service" in such a way that people who will never make Facebook any money can still use it for free. You don't want to share your data with Facebook? Fine, don't use it.
Charging a monthly fee is an interesting alternative, but I doubt they will have many takers. Anybody who really cares is (quite rightly) not going to trust Facebook no matter how much they pay them, and the rest just don't care. Bring on the funny cats.
Kudos to Meta / Facebook for calling EU regulator's bluff. We'll finally see how many people who find it fashionable to complain about privacy infringements put money where their mouth is by opting for the paid account and how overzealous the EU regulator is for overestimating that number.
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