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.
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.
This might be unpopular, but here goes nothing:
With the correct and fitting (and fair) regulations, oversight by the government and accountabilit, this is a correct and more ethical decision.
Stuff costs money. For now. Infrastructure, wages, repairs, fixes, improvements, new features.
All these things dont come free and we only pay nothing DIRECTLY, because we pay in data, attention and privacy violations.
By fixing this issue, the access to all these things can be secured without the plattform falling appart or having to resort to invasive data harvesting. We could even make these practices illegal, because plattforms would not just die then.
And no, the price should not be so high to generate profit for the executives. Thats why regulation is so important.
In the Modern Age we live in, Social Media is at this point akin to an essential service and should therefore be regulated as such: No profit, but stable maintenance and secure access free from monetary interest for everyone equally.
This is an insightful perspective and I agree in principle I think.
I think the $14 is actually egregious. Punitive even. The cost to facebook of providing content per user per month would be less than $1. Let’s not forget that they can still earn revenue from these users, it’s just the data profiling that’s limited so their ads may be less efficient to some degree.
Yeah, access to facebook probably is an essential service. Particularly for people who are disadvantaged or impoverished. But, I do wish it wasn’t so, and mandating that facebook provide access is the wrong approach IMO. I would rather see open, free-from-advertising platforms promoted.
Imagine if every town or city had it’s own lemmy & mastodon instances - not necessarily even federated. All your fb marketplace stuff, community and social groups happening there instead of facebook.
People on the internet are too used to having everything for free. But then they also want no ads and trackers. Do they expect everything to be built by some slaves or by volunteers?
I just don’t get why this should be an unpopular opinion at all.
p.s. I don’t use Facebook. Or any other social media really.
I expect some sods grandma (or even my own) to watch the ad on my behalf.
I feel like those “I want FOSS for everything” people seriously thinks software devs are slaves who must fulfill their wishes at any time and if they happened to make money in some way or other, it’s like they are the devils themselves.
it doesn’t matter if it’s a company or one guy who purely spends his free time with a project.
Would have been nice if they decided to give that option during the early days when they made the decision to start mining data and selling it off. I totally would have been up for a reasonable fee to keep my data felt bad for Julian from being sold.
FB is struggling with an interesting problem. If you have enough early adopters, the rest of the population will follow. These things behave a bit like the critical mass in nuclear fission. Once you cross over a specific threshold, that’s when things start happening. In the early days of FB, it was all about growth and providing value to the users.
Once they had enough users, they started selling user data to advertisers. At that point, most users weren’t particularly privacy aware, and you could argue that it still isn’t ja major concern for a most people who use platforms like Tweetook or Snapstgram. People here on Lemmy aren’t really a representative sample of the rest of the population.
Providing a privacy friendly option wasn’t really that necessary back in those days. Providing a paid option might also hurt the ad sales, so that would have been a risky move. If only a certain part of the uses are subjected to data harvesting and ads, you’re essentially selling an inferior product to the advertisers. Sounds like a very risky move if the subscription becomes more popular.
If that happens FB would have to cross that bridge quickly. Being in the middle is a very precarious position, because the way I see it, these options don’t really support each other.
zuck’s ego fueled endeavors cost money, actual services upkeep and development is a small fraction of it.
this lizard already has insanely profitable business at hand, but it’s hard to combine steady performance for shareholders and shit like metaverse at the same time, so he needs to milk users for even more money.
It really is kind of crazy how angry people get now at the thought of paying for something they use daily.