The idea of paying for use instead of data collection is a good one. The problem is that the companies are treating it as another money grab instead of a reasonable alternative payment option. They don't make anywhere close to $10 a month selling ads to a user. If they wanted to offer $2 bucks a month, they would probably still profit more on this, and it would also be a reasonable deal for the user.
edit: not correct. Closer to $20 per month per user in the US for FB actually.
It's the average per user, not a precise figure that fits on every user, but nevertheless I have seen no evidence to suggest that it would be inaccurate so far. Maybe you can find some?
> They don't make anywhere close to $10 a month selling ads to a user.
This is somewhat incorrect. In Europe (which this is about), Facebook's average revenue per user is about $70 per year (~$6/mo), and in the US it's around $232 (~$19/mo). Taking into account the additional overhead of collecting payments from individual users, support, etc., it's definitely not orders of magnitude away.
I guess I was wrong about that. I remember reading years ago how shockingly little revenue targeted ads actually generate per user, but that must have changed. Also curious why FB is making 3x as much per user in the US vs Europe.
I'd guess it's a combination of three things: GDPR reducing the effectiveness of targeted ads, the online advertising industry being more mature/established in the US, and Europe being generally more fragmented, reducing the size of ad campaigns.
GDP with PPP compensated is on par or better in NW Europe and for all of the EU it's about 70% of the USA (which has about 100m more people than the USA). You'd expect it to be a lot closer.
Yes it is most likely to be less but not a factor of 3 simply based on purchasing power alone.
I'm sure it's not the only factor but it's surely one. Here in Spain we really make a lot less than in NW Europe. central and eastern Europe are even worse off.
Do you mean US advertisers are paying three times more to FB than the advertisers in the EU?
Please don't confuse things. FB users aren't FB's customers. FB doesn't get any money directly from the (on average just a little bit) richer US users.
"Shockingly little revenue targeted ads generate per user" is also relative to the context. I bang on these numbers a lot on HN because for many of us here, the amount of damage Facebook does to our lives, the amount of ads it shoves in our face, and the way it has contorted an entire industry into surveillance capitalism, is way, way more than $20/month worth of damage to our lives, culture, and society. It is also a good way to counter the frequently-proposed "what if the companies share ad revenue with their users?", which along with being sort of a "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" problem if you really analyze what that entails, has the even more fatal problem that there really isn't any money to do that with. If we cut you in for 50% of the ads you see in a month, you might be looking at a whopping $15-20 a month, or, pretty close to a single hour at what is roughly the de facto minimum wage. Even if we ignore how that instantly pushes all these companies from megaprofitable behemoths to bleeding money out of every orifice, $15-20/month isn't enough to make a compelling story on that front.
I think a lot of people have a mental model based on the size of these companies that they must be making hundreds of dollars a month per user, and it's good to run the numbers to show they don't so society can make more reasonable plans.
What is HN opinion on the practice to one day you show a popup to your user with new terms, you either accept or you leave , no way to enter and export your data or contacts. It is kind of shitty IMO all this ToS that are always updating, even with paid products you are forced into accepting the ToS or get fcked
Average revenue per user is $70/year in the EU and $230 in the US. But how much of that is profit? How to costs compare between serving a user ads and serving an ad-free user?
Server costs for images, text, and the occasional video can't be that high per user at Facebook's scale of billions.
But costs for the Rube Goldberg machine of ad hosting, recommendations, bidding, and serving? There's a whole lot of backend infra and middleware behind that. We should assume, at the very least, that ad-free users are cheaper for Facebook (unless they go through all of the backend recommendation processes for all users but simply hide ads from ad-free users). I assume that with some optimization ad-free users ought to be significantly cheaper to serve.
The backend cost per user is going to be about the same for a user anywhere in the world. So we can set an upper bound on the cost at the level of revenue per user in the market that generated the least revenue per user. That's going to scale with GDP per capita, so I feel safe saying that there are many markets where they get less than $10 per user per year, and therefore their marginal cost per user is less than that.
Also important to remember this is _average_ revenue per user. Consider that the cohort of users that are more likely to pay the monthly subscription are probably more valuable ad targets (more disposable income to spend online)
There is also the problem that you would pay them per month to not see ads and then they would still collect data on you and sell it. Where is this idea coming from that they are going to stop data collection just because you pay them to stop serving you ads?
I have yet to see a compelling argument as to why they shouldn't be able to set whatever prices they want. They are a private company, they do not have a monopoly, and their service is anything but essential.
I'm not sure if this applies in this specific case (or if this is covered in the article), but one of the main concerns is that privacy basically becomes something only the rich can afford.
Of course, this sort of thing happens in basically every other aspect of our lives, but depending on how the law is written it may or may not be legal. For example, the rich can afford safer cars, but there are still minimum safety requirements. Presumably a car company could release a cheap car without seat belts, ABS brakes, etc. The market may like this, but it may not be allowed under the law.
A company may charge whatever they want for non-ad or non-tracking plans, but if they are priced out of the reach of most people, they may not be following intent of the law or how it is written.
Of course there's also the moral argument as well, but I'm guessing you were thinking more of the legal/economic side.
Because the law says that consent is only valid if it is freely given and freely revocable. Privacy is a right, not a privilege. If Facebook's business model is dependent upon breaching the rights of their users, then the EU does not want their business.
What you're writing is probably true but kind of irrelevant. They set whatever price they want and if you don't like it, don't use it.
Personally, I block all the ads and tracking, use a specific browser for whenever I browse facebook under a fake account so paying $10 a month is not worth it to me.
I maybe would pay if it was like $2 but at the same time I don't really use Meta products to actually pay for it. I agree that the price is ridiculously high but at the same time I can't blame them. At least they finally give users a choice, something I never thought would happen.
I know you’ve acknowledged the numbers in your response are off, but nevertheless there’s a seemingly problematic assumption underlying this statement even if your numbers held true: there’s no reason that Facebook should only ask users to cover the opportunity cost difference between having ads and not having ads.
Although the “appropriateness” of the fee may be called into question, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Facebook will successfully argue that with operating costs of around 6 billion per month, and around 3 billion MAU (i.e. around 2 USD/user), with good SaaS margins expected to be around 80%, a charge of around 10 USD per month is not “inappropriate”, which is almost exactly what they’re charging.
Being an advertiser with a targeted portfolio and control over the marketplace is HUGELY profitable. Companies keep sticking ads in things for a reason, and Google and Facebook are multi-billion-dollar companies off of the ads and tracking alone.
> Some right, like the right to life, is illegal to sell.
Every "real" right can't be sold, if you could it wouldn't be a right. That's why it is for example impossible to give away or sell your copyright in the EU.
> You can't get unlimited education without paying.
That's why the formulation in the EU paper is as follows:
Article 14
Right to education
1. Everyone has the right to education and to have access to vocational and continuing training.
2. This right includes the possibility to receive free compulsory education.
3. The freedom to found educational establishments with due respect for democratic principles and the right of parents to ensure the education and teaching of their children in conformity with their religious, philosophical and pedagogical convictions shall be respected, in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of such freedom and right.
I don't get all the fuss. I remember seeing the prompt, was a bit startled as I never seen such a proposal from Facebook but YouTube used to prompt me all the time before subscribing to Premium so I didn't think anything's amiss.
The decision was quick: content quality and quantity on Facebook in no way compares to YouTube, once I take out the Reels, Instagram and TikTok ripoffs (which are mostly available on YouTube as well), there's very little left.
Text content is abysmal, particularly when the reference is Hacker News. Links to retarded news sites and magazines which present one line of "content" which merely repeats the all-caps title spread across 15 pages of seizure-inducing advert horror.
Literally most of the use is to keep in touch with old and estranged acquaintances but that's not worth 6 or 10 euro per month they were charging for ad free.
It's interesting how the situation seems to shift depending on the lens you view it through:
A) Facebook is free, but pay €9.99/mo. if you don't want ads or ad tracking
B) Facebook costs €9.99/mo., but will enable a free tier if you'll accept ads/tracking
Option A seems to provoke outrage (like this article/lawsuit), while option B seems... perfectly reasonable. Even though they're the same thing.
People just hate having stuff taken away from them. They feel that Facebook ought to be free because it always has been, the same way a lot of people are still bothered by checked baggage fees on airlines because checked baggage had been included for decades.
But legally, there's really no difference. And companies have to make money somehow. It would be fascinating if EU regulations actually led to the birth of an alternate, optional internet model where you paid $40/mo. extra to your ISP that got sent to Meta/Google/etc. according to your browsing proportions and resulted in no ads and no ad tracking across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, AdSense, etc.
Loosely related on the "alternate model", maybe some inspiration from different broker operating models can be used.
There are the brokers that operate on a commission basis: you get the exchange price but pay a commission on each trade.
And there's the "free" brokers where there's no commission because it's already included in the spread. That is, the price you see is a resell of the original exchange price with broker's markup. I ain't fooled by "free" which can end up more expensive than transparently commissioned but maybe some people are.
You misunderstood the issue, tracking is required for the free tier which is likely illegal in some areas. FB is allowed to use ads or no ads at different price points, but can’t add tracking automatically with ads.
It’s like selling dates. If you’re selling your time that’s fine, so a lunch dating experience is fine. However, if you bundle sex in with a ‘overnight experience’ that’s considered prostitution and illegal in many areas.
Companies breaking the law isn’t about individual using or not using it, if the service itself is illegal.
Facebook is likely in the same situation as drug dealers, prostitutes, assassins etc the existence of willing customers doesn’t make their business model legal. They can change their business model or change the law.
Of course if it’s possible that they win, but completely baseless lawsuits get dismissed.
Many of these things indeed leak your data and usage patterns to Facebook (among other malicious actors), whether you use it or not (some do it server-side so no amount of client-side countermeasures will help).
Many people have years invested into facebook. Taking it away would be just like involuntarily wiping your phone and computer to factory settings, with no backup. It's something you'd recover to some extent from, but it a) would take a lot of time and a lot of work, which you might not have time for right now, and b) people will forget to tell you about parties, indefinitely.
I'm using empathy here, as someone who quit facebook 15 years ago. Saying it's easy to quit facebook is like saying it's easy to quit the gas company, or eating meat. You don't have to use natural gas, and you don't need meat.
Do you have a source for that? Because that would definitely be the crux of the issue then.
The article itself quotes:
> "In its ruling, the CJEU expressly recognised that a subscription model, like the one we are announcing, is a valid form of consent for an ads funded service."
which suggests that it is not illegal. But of course this depends on whether the "ads funded service" includes tracking.
I can't find any clear answers from a few quick google searches. Of course, the existence of this lawsuit suggests that the law itself may not yet be sufficiently clear, and so the judicial ruling will ultimately provide that clarity.
It is safe to assume that Meta will absolutely have tracking and data collection to the nines on this, because they have glibly been pleading ignorance and shock every step of the way as they've wrenched things towards the most anti-privacy interpretation possible whenever they get the obvious door in the face.
They just don't get any benefit of the doubt anymore.
It IS illegal in the EU under the GDPR. People need to *voluntarily* consent to give access to their data. What Meta did, which is "give access to your data or you need to pay to access the site" is not by any stretch "freely given".
Same thing for many websites in France but I didn't find any track if it being challenged in court.
I doubt EU lawmakers planned for this approach to defeat privacy laws, it's definitely against the spirit but this will need an update. In FB case if you pay they 100% still track you anyway, they've been pretty clear they don't care even if they get caught.
Another angle against FB moving to a paid access system would be they could be considered public service due to how omnipresent the service is in day to day life, but lately it's probably more true for their other services like Insta or Whatsapp.
Yup, and those three links don't provide a clear answer against it either.
For example, the ICO link specifically states that it's OK to make a customer rewards loyalty card dependent upon tracking -- a clear exchange of allowing tracking explicitly in exchange for cash equivalents. That's still consent freely given.
A lot of the limits around consent are described with regards to employment, because there's an imbalance of power there. But that's irrelevant here.
The clearest prohibition is around "coupling", e.g. you can't make a purchase of an online grocery order contingent on sharing your data with third parties, because there's nothing "necessary" about that to fulfill the purpose.
But it seems pretty easy to make the case that tracking is "necessary" for fully effective advertising (ads without tracking perform much worse). So either subscribe for no ads (thus no tracking), or accept ads (and accept tracking). There doesn't seem to be any imbalance of power here, because you don't need to use Facebook the way you need to keep a job. Your consent is freely given, just like with a rewards card.
Although at the end of the day, the law does seems vague enough that it will be useful for a court decision to clarify it.
There’s a major flaw in that argument. Advertising without tracking still generates revenue, so having two different amounts of advertising based on tracking or no tracking is likely permissible.
However, linking the lack of tracking with buying a zero advertising tier is clearly coupling not a discount. Consider the reverse what if someone wants to pay for zero advertising but is perfectly willing to have tracking. Thus we’ve discovered 4 possible decisions and FB is trying to artificially limit them.
Are the courts really supposed to mandate that FB provide 4 tiers instead of just 2?
We're already in checkbox hell with the various popups. And the notion of "coupling" is notoriously hard to define in practice.
It's precisely the vagueness around what is and isn't coupling, that I could see the courts going either way. I was really just arguing that it's not clear cut according to the law as written.
I agree there is some vagueness here, but the number of options isn’t mandated. The only mandate is the for people to be able to avoid tracking. FB is free to only have 1 option advertising supported without tracking, or 1 option paid without tracking.
They can have 2 options advertising based with and without tracking, or 3 if they add paid without tracking etc.
It’s the same deal as wheelchair access. You don’t need to have stairs if you’ve got a ramp, but stairs alone doesn’t qualify as wheelchair accessible.
I think newspapers received an explicit carve out a little while back, which is where I think it's quite fair to call out the EU on a bit of hypocrisy.
What that describes is a problem with the actual wording/sequence/nudging involved, and the result was merely a "reprimand".
It doesn't seem to declare that the model is fundamentally illegal. Also, wouldn't that kind of decision need to be taken at the EU level? Because until then, you could have all sorts of inconsistencies between localities and countries.
This is one of the dumbest things about GDPR and one of the reasons why the EU has a stagnant tech industry. Their own regulations choke their companies to death.
The thing is, I can't find any part of that ruling[0] that even remotely matches Meta's claim. Can somebody point it out for me?
And it makes sense that there is nothing like that in there. Subscriptions were totally irrelevant to the actual questions that the CJEU was asked to rule on in that case (which was e.g. a claim by the German competition authorities that it was impossible for anyone to freely consent to tracking by Meta due to them having a dominant market position, and a counter-claim that the competition authorities did not even have jurisdiction over a GDPR case).
Actually, as you pointed, there's a BIG difference between
- "this is free forever" (remember FaceBook moto), killing the market using this and then, when there's no nore competitor (on specific age class for example), saying "OK, now pay"
AND
- "this is a charged service, but you may access it for free as long as you respect some limitations" : in that case, from day-1, you know that either you'll have a basic service or you'll have to pay someday.
Note: in the second case, when a "free tier" is degraded to force people to pay, it's the same problem as Facebook...
In fact, I think that the real problem here - and what people are fed up with - is the bait-and-switch
1) I promise that I'll promise something for free forever
2) People trust me and invest in me... so I kill the market
3) Then, when there's no real competitor, I try to charge
Even for capitalist, this way of doing business is just: how to build a monopoly to evade the market competition
So yeah... let's sue Facebook... and make it a clear example for all businesses around the world that this way of doing things is definetly NOT OKAY
Nobody is going to opt in to having their data used for advertising in exchange for nothing at all. It will eventually be held that it's abusive to even give people that option. So the obvious solution would be to take away the option entirely and give Europeans the option to have a paid account with no ads/tracking or to be locked out of the site. Of course, the EU could just whine about how Americans get Facebook for "free" but Europeans don't.
If the EU really wants to ban ad-supported sites, they should just come out and do it.
You can have ads, just don't intrusively track your users and harvest all their data en-masse. Ads != Tracking, as can be seen literally everywhere that isn't the internet where ads exist.
This is more akin to not liking sharp rocks, but choosing to throw yourself off a cliff.
It's not like the sharp rocks at the bottom of that cliff are waiting for you as you live your life frolicking across gentle meadows. You have to choose to go and climb that cliff and throw yourself off the top of it.
These are not natural fixtures, they are active creations and constructions of a business. If a business on main street was actively putting up illegal hazards to the pubic then it is fair to shut that crud down.
> the same way a lot of people are still bothered by checked baggage fees on airlines because checked baggage had been included for decades.
no, it's because of the predatory manner in which these fees are presented. they hook you on the cheap price of the ticket, and then whack you in the head with the fees so that the actual cost of the trip is no where near the advertised ticket price. much like ticketmaster, airbnb, resorts, and any other industry with these additional charges
All fees and taxes posted up front with a grand total below them. And preferably some check boxes to include or remove some fees from the calculation if they are or are not relevant to your particular situation.
At the very least some warning that additional fees exist and will be calculated at checkout or whatever isn't too much to ask.
This is definitely in the right direction, but I'd go further in saying that you cannot advertise based on the base price anywhere--ever when you know that this prices is not what the customer will be charged.
You don't 'need' tracking for ads, but it has a huge impact on the the amount of revenue per impression the ads will generate, because tracking enables you to show ads to the people those ads are relevant to.
There are a lot of business models that are feasible with tracking for ads, but are not feasible to offer for free without tracking.
Anyways the whole discussion is moot, tracking of users is illegal. Im sure slavery versus freedom of employment also has a huge impact on the amount of revenue a farm might have. Protections and regulations are usually created for a reason.
Option B is what some German online newspapers have been doing, and so far it's held in the lower courts, but there's been no binding precedent at national or Europe-wide level. If that were confirmed at a higher level, then legally, there would be a very big difference between Options A and B.
A recent ruling on behavioural advertising seems to suggest that Option B may not be in accord with the law either, and that's certainly what the NOYB lawsuit claims.
> People just hate having stuff taken away from them. They feel that Facebook ought to be free because it always has been, the same way a lot of people are still bothered by checked baggage fees on airlines because checked baggage had been included for decades.
This isn't entirely true. Companies didn't reduce ticket fares at the same time when they rolled out baggage fees. It was a de-facto price increase for many travelers.
Is there a consensus on how much CTR you're giving up with context-based (as opposed to tracking-based) ad selection?
Are we talking 1% or are we talking 50%?
(What if tracking-based ads are actually less effective, as in: "I'm hesitant to click on an ad that keeps following me around"; "I've already bought this thing, will you please stop showing me this ad?"; etc)
A) Pay the 10 euros a month, no ads, no tracking whatsoever
B) Don't pay the 10 euros a month, get ads, but no tracking if you don't EXPLICITLY consent to it. Ads != tracking, they can exist without invasive tracking.
C) Don't pay the 10 euros, get ads and assuming you don't care about tracking you consent to it. You get more personalized ads in exchange for this, which for some people I guess is a good deal
Instead, what's happening is:
A) Pay the 10 euros a month, get no ads, but still get tracked (let's be real here, it's Meta we're talking about)
B) Don't pay, you have no option but to consent to being tracked and being shown ads. This is what's illegal. If they don't want users to have a chance to voice their consent, then they should close down shop in the EU and only offer their services to paying customers, but we all know Meta doesn't want to lose out on the 2nd largest market in the world.
>They feel that Facebook ought to be free because it always has been...
Maybe, juuuuust maybe, putting the phrase, "It's free, and always will be," right next to where you log in for eleven years wasn't the smartest of ideas.
> EU law requires that consent is the genuine free will of the user.
Thus instantly began a circus of bad faith by countless companies.
Maybe it's time to just plain outlaw everything for which "cookie consent" UI make a show of getting consent. Doing a cookie consent UI would also be illegal.
Like (many places) prostitution is illegal, and soliciting it is illegal.
Surveillance and prostitution are arguably both violations of privacy/self human rights. Which society might decide may not be compelled nor bought&sold.
I don't see the alternative they propose? Pay up or don't use? They still need to pay their devs and the infrastructure (and make a profit, per current legislation and model).
Obviously, despite every form of advertisement that isn't on the internet not being able to collect private information about individual users, that could never work.
I don't understand the obsession with Meta and ads here, because it seems so disproportionally overblown when compared with real issues. Ads are so much the least of our worries that I'm not sure what this fight means in the context of this dystopian century. Autistic escapism? A distraction?
This fight is being taken up by a privacy group noyb. It is not necessarily against Meta directly, but against all websites that attempt to force consent for tracking. Noyb is looking to set a precedent. Meta is the biggest company doing this, and so a win here would send the message of 'If Meta can not defend this, then a smaller website definitely can not defend this'. Noyb has been known in the past to create mass filings against companies that have a clear, well defined breach of privacy.
As to if there are bigger fights to fight. Probably. But noyb has chosen to fight this fight, and I think that is fine. Someone else will have to pick up the other fights.
To maximize revenue you need to maximize the number of ads people see. To maximize the number of ads people see, you maximize the amount of time people spend on the platform. To maximize the time people spend on the platform you need highly engaging content. The cheapest form of highly engaging content is mostly composted of clickbaits, polarizing news, disinformation, conspiracy theories, etc. And when people spend most of their time with this kind of content, they tend to lose the ability to engage with serious, thoughtful, reasoned, informed, and nuanced content, first because it's hard to find and second because it requires genuine effort to consume.
The user still has the option not to consent to either option, in which case they don't get to use the service and their privacy is respected.
I don't think there is a case to be made against Meta here. What alternative did the group envision exactly? The company has to make money somehow, so "free and private" is off the table. That leaves us with the option "pay or your account gets deactivated", but who benefits from this solution?
It's one thing to not read the article, another to not read the other comments in a discussion forum. :D
A lot of people are mentioning the possibility of ads without tracking or the gathering of personal information. Less lucrative for Meta, but certainly a workable alternative.
I think the worst part is that I don't trust the parasite that is Meta to not still track paying users anyways. If anything, they're probably more likely to be tracked even more invasively after they pay up. You telling me the company doing all the shadow profile crap is gonna suddenly stop tracking you just cause you pay up? If you believe that, I've got a bridge hot off the presses for you.
And what happens if you stop paying eventually? You've just indicated to them that you're a juicy target to harvest data from, so you're even more fucked and are gonna get even worse privacy intrusions than ever before.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadedit: not correct. Closer to $20 per month per user in the US for FB actually.
For Facebook is would be either 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, or 4% of said revenue.
A bit bigger than a rounding error.
Even when they got close to actually getting a deterring fine, the corrupt Irish DPA bailed them out: https://noyb.eu/en/irish-data-protection-authority-gives-eu-...
This is somewhat incorrect. In Europe (which this is about), Facebook's average revenue per user is about $70 per year (~$6/mo), and in the US it's around $232 (~$19/mo). Taking into account the additional overhead of collecting payments from individual users, support, etc., it's definitely not orders of magnitude away.
All data from Meta's last annual report: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/e574646...
Yes it is most likely to be less but not a factor of 3 simply based on purchasing power alone.
The delta there shows what that's worth.
Please don't confuse things. FB users aren't FB's customers. FB doesn't get any money directly from the (on average just a little bit) richer US users.
Culture may differ, but human brains work the same in the end.
I think a lot of people have a mental model based on the size of these companies that they must be making hundreds of dollars a month per user, and it's good to run the numbers to show they don't so society can make more reasonable plans.
Server costs for images, text, and the occasional video can't be that high per user at Facebook's scale of billions.
But costs for the Rube Goldberg machine of ad hosting, recommendations, bidding, and serving? There's a whole lot of backend infra and middleware behind that. We should assume, at the very least, that ad-free users are cheaper for Facebook (unless they go through all of the backend recommendation processes for all users but simply hide ads from ad-free users). I assume that with some optimization ad-free users ought to be significantly cheaper to serve.
This is not what this is.
It's paying or seeing ads. Tracking is done anyway. For the ads they do still sell on other platforms.
What should really be the case is to have untracked ads as an option instead of targeted ones.
Of course, this sort of thing happens in basically every other aspect of our lives, but depending on how the law is written it may or may not be legal. For example, the rich can afford safer cars, but there are still minimum safety requirements. Presumably a car company could release a cheap car without seat belts, ABS brakes, etc. The market may like this, but it may not be allowed under the law.
A company may charge whatever they want for non-ad or non-tracking plans, but if they are priced out of the reach of most people, they may not be following intent of the law or how it is written.
Of course there's also the moral argument as well, but I'm guessing you were thinking more of the legal/economic side.
Personally, I block all the ads and tracking, use a specific browser for whenever I browse facebook under a fake account so paying $10 a month is not worth it to me.
I maybe would pay if it was like $2 but at the same time I don't really use Meta products to actually pay for it. I agree that the price is ridiculously high but at the same time I can't blame them. At least they finally give users a choice, something I never thought would happen.
Me paying for it, now, that's an interesting proposition.
Although the “appropriateness” of the fee may be called into question, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Facebook will successfully argue that with operating costs of around 6 billion per month, and around 3 billion MAU (i.e. around 2 USD/user), with good SaaS margins expected to be around 80%, a charge of around 10 USD per month is not “inappropriate”, which is almost exactly what they’re charging.
- why has meta not asked before for consent?*
- how did they pay their business until now?
- why is it so expensive?
*Information privacy doesn't count obviously
- from selling ads
- it’s about equal to your value as an ad viewer
Being an advertiser with a targeted portfolio and control over the marketplace is HUGELY profitable. Companies keep sticking ads in things for a reason, and Google and Facebook are multi-billion-dollar companies off of the ads and tracking alone.
I wonder what make a right fundamental or not?
Some right, like the right to life, is illegal to sell.. You can't let others kill you in exchange of money.
UN list "right to education", which, is not that universal.. You can't get unlimited education without paying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
Well, of course there is a document for that (see "Article 8"): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12...
> Some right, like the right to life, is illegal to sell.
Every "real" right can't be sold, if you could it wouldn't be a right. That's why it is for example impossible to give away or sell your copyright in the EU.
> You can't get unlimited education without paying.
That's why the formulation in the EU paper is as follows:
The decision was quick: content quality and quantity on Facebook in no way compares to YouTube, once I take out the Reels, Instagram and TikTok ripoffs (which are mostly available on YouTube as well), there's very little left.
Text content is abysmal, particularly when the reference is Hacker News. Links to retarded news sites and magazines which present one line of "content" which merely repeats the all-caps title spread across 15 pages of seizure-inducing advert horror.
Literally most of the use is to keep in touch with old and estranged acquaintances but that's not worth 6 or 10 euro per month they were charging for ad free.
A) Facebook is free, but pay €9.99/mo. if you don't want ads or ad tracking
B) Facebook costs €9.99/mo., but will enable a free tier if you'll accept ads/tracking
Option A seems to provoke outrage (like this article/lawsuit), while option B seems... perfectly reasonable. Even though they're the same thing.
People just hate having stuff taken away from them. They feel that Facebook ought to be free because it always has been, the same way a lot of people are still bothered by checked baggage fees on airlines because checked baggage had been included for decades.
But legally, there's really no difference. And companies have to make money somehow. It would be fascinating if EU regulations actually led to the birth of an alternate, optional internet model where you paid $40/mo. extra to your ISP that got sent to Meta/Google/etc. according to your browsing proportions and resulted in no ads and no ad tracking across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, AdSense, etc.
There are the brokers that operate on a commission basis: you get the exchange price but pay a commission on each trade.
And there's the "free" brokers where there's no commission because it's already included in the spread. That is, the price you see is a resell of the original exchange price with broker's markup. I ain't fooled by "free" which can end up more expensive than transparently commissioned but maybe some people are.
It’s like selling dates. If you’re selling your time that’s fine, so a lunch dating experience is fine. However, if you bundle sex in with a ‘overnight experience’ that’s considered prostitution and illegal in many areas.
Facebook is likely in the same situation as drug dealers, prostitutes, assassins etc the existence of willing customers doesn’t make their business model legal. They can change their business model or change the law.
Of course if it’s possible that they win, but completely baseless lawsuits get dismissed.
I'm using empathy here, as someone who quit facebook 15 years ago. Saying it's easy to quit facebook is like saying it's easy to quit the gas company, or eating meat. You don't have to use natural gas, and you don't need meat.
Do you have a source for that? Because that would definitely be the crux of the issue then.
The article itself quotes:
> "In its ruling, the CJEU expressly recognised that a subscription model, like the one we are announcing, is a valid form of consent for an ads funded service."
which suggests that it is not illegal. But of course this depends on whether the "ads funded service" includes tracking.
I can't find any clear answers from a few quick google searches. Of course, the existence of this lawsuit suggests that the law itself may not yet be sufficiently clear, and so the judicial ruling will ultimately provide that clarity.
They just don't get any benefit of the doubt anymore.
Source, for example https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/consent/#:~:text=Consent%20must%....
or
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
or
https://www.bfdi.bund.de/EN/Buerger/Inhalte/Allgemein/Datens...
I doubt EU lawmakers planned for this approach to defeat privacy laws, it's definitely against the spirit but this will need an update. In FB case if you pay they 100% still track you anyway, they've been pretty clear they don't care even if they get caught.
Another angle against FB moving to a paid access system would be they could be considered public service due to how omnipresent the service is in day to day life, but lately it's probably more true for their other services like Insta or Whatsapp.
For example, the ICO link specifically states that it's OK to make a customer rewards loyalty card dependent upon tracking -- a clear exchange of allowing tracking explicitly in exchange for cash equivalents. That's still consent freely given.
A lot of the limits around consent are described with regards to employment, because there's an imbalance of power there. But that's irrelevant here.
The clearest prohibition is around "coupling", e.g. you can't make a purchase of an online grocery order contingent on sharing your data with third parties, because there's nothing "necessary" about that to fulfill the purpose.
But it seems pretty easy to make the case that tracking is "necessary" for fully effective advertising (ads without tracking perform much worse). So either subscribe for no ads (thus no tracking), or accept ads (and accept tracking). There doesn't seem to be any imbalance of power here, because you don't need to use Facebook the way you need to keep a job. Your consent is freely given, just like with a rewards card.
Although at the end of the day, the law does seems vague enough that it will be useful for a court decision to clarify it.
However, linking the lack of tracking with buying a zero advertising tier is clearly coupling not a discount. Consider the reverse what if someone wants to pay for zero advertising but is perfectly willing to have tracking. Thus we’ve discovered 4 possible decisions and FB is trying to artificially limit them.
Are the courts really supposed to mandate that FB provide 4 tiers instead of just 2?
We're already in checkbox hell with the various popups. And the notion of "coupling" is notoriously hard to define in practice.
It's precisely the vagueness around what is and isn't coupling, that I could see the courts going either way. I was really just arguing that it's not clear cut according to the law as written.
They can have 2 options advertising based with and without tracking, or 3 if they add paid without tracking etc.
It’s the same deal as wheelchair access. You don’t need to have stairs if you’ve got a ramp, but stairs alone doesn’t qualify as wheelchair accessible.
https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illega...
However, law is slow and it will take a while to propagate to more sites.
It doesn't seem to declare that the model is fundamentally illegal. Also, wouldn't that kind of decision need to be taken at the EU level? Because until then, you could have all sorts of inconsistencies between localities and countries.
> This is one of the dumbest things about GDPR and one of the reasons why the EU has a stagnant tech industry.
If progress means having to exist in a world without the GDPR, then I'm good stagnating.
And it makes sense that there is nothing like that in there. Subscriptions were totally irrelevant to the actual questions that the CJEU was asked to rule on in that case (which was e.g. a claim by the German competition authorities that it was impossible for anyone to freely consent to tracking by Meta due to them having a dominant market position, and a counter-claim that the competition authorities did not even have jurisdiction over a GDPR case).
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
- "this is free forever" (remember FaceBook moto), killing the market using this and then, when there's no nore competitor (on specific age class for example), saying "OK, now pay"
AND
- "this is a charged service, but you may access it for free as long as you respect some limitations" : in that case, from day-1, you know that either you'll have a basic service or you'll have to pay someday.
Note: in the second case, when a "free tier" is degraded to force people to pay, it's the same problem as Facebook...
In fact, I think that the real problem here - and what people are fed up with - is the bait-and-switch
1) I promise that I'll promise something for free forever 2) People trust me and invest in me... so I kill the market 3) Then, when there's no real competitor, I try to charge
Even for capitalist, this way of doing business is just: how to build a monopoly to evade the market competition
So yeah... let's sue Facebook... and make it a clear example for all businesses around the world that this way of doing things is definetly NOT OKAY
I guess this case will clarify whether that's true.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/
If the EU really wants to ban ad-supported sites, they should just come out and do it.
This is more akin to not liking sharp rocks, but choosing to throw yourself off a cliff.
It's not like the sharp rocks at the bottom of that cliff are waiting for you as you live your life frolicking across gentle meadows. You have to choose to go and climb that cliff and throw yourself off the top of it.
No-one is forcing you to use their service.
no, it's because of the predatory manner in which these fees are presented. they hook you on the cheap price of the ticket, and then whack you in the head with the fees so that the actual cost of the trip is no where near the advertised ticket price. much like ticketmaster, airbnb, resorts, and any other industry with these additional charges
All fees and taxes posted up front with a grand total below them. And preferably some check boxes to include or remove some fees from the calculation if they are or are not relevant to your particular situation.
At the very least some warning that additional fees exist and will be calculated at checkout or whatever isn't too much to ask.
You don't actually need tracking for ads.
There are a lot of business models that are feasible with tracking for ads, but are not feasible to offer for free without tracking.
Option B is what some German online newspapers have been doing, and so far it's held in the lower courts, but there's been no binding precedent at national or Europe-wide level. If that were confirmed at a higher level, then legally, there would be a very big difference between Options A and B.
A recent ruling on behavioural advertising seems to suggest that Option B may not be in accord with the law either, and that's certainly what the NOYB lawsuit claims.
This isn't entirely true. Companies didn't reduce ticket fares at the same time when they rolled out baggage fees. It was a de-facto price increase for many travelers.
A) Pay 9.99. No tracking.
B) Ads. No tracking.
C) Ads. Tracking. For that consent is required.
The point is that consent needs to be voluntary to be valid. That is the huge legal difference. Pretty simple concept, but unpopular with advertisers.
So the comparison with A) is a red herring to distract from the lack of consent.
Are we talking 1% or are we talking 50%?
(What if tracking-based ads are actually less effective, as in: "I'm hesitant to click on an ad that keeps following me around"; "I've already bought this thing, will you please stop showing me this ad?"; etc)
A) Pay the 10 euros a month, no ads, no tracking whatsoever
B) Don't pay the 10 euros a month, get ads, but no tracking if you don't EXPLICITLY consent to it. Ads != tracking, they can exist without invasive tracking.
C) Don't pay the 10 euros, get ads and assuming you don't care about tracking you consent to it. You get more personalized ads in exchange for this, which for some people I guess is a good deal
Instead, what's happening is:
A) Pay the 10 euros a month, get no ads, but still get tracked (let's be real here, it's Meta we're talking about)
B) Don't pay, you have no option but to consent to being tracked and being shown ads. This is what's illegal. If they don't want users to have a chance to voice their consent, then they should close down shop in the EU and only offer their services to paying customers, but we all know Meta doesn't want to lose out on the 2nd largest market in the world.
Maybe, juuuuust maybe, putting the phrase, "It's free, and always will be," right next to where you log in for eleven years wasn't the smartest of ideas.
this isn't confusing.
Thus instantly began a circus of bad faith by countless companies.
Maybe it's time to just plain outlaw everything for which "cookie consent" UI make a show of getting consent. Doing a cookie consent UI would also be illegal.
Like (many places) prostitution is illegal, and soliciting it is illegal.
As to if there are bigger fights to fight. Probably. But noyb has chosen to fight this fight, and I think that is fine. Someone else will have to pick up the other fights.
I like this idea.
I don't think there is a case to be made against Meta here. What alternative did the group envision exactly? The company has to make money somehow, so "free and private" is off the table. That leaves us with the option "pay or your account gets deactivated", but who benefits from this solution?
A lot of people are mentioning the possibility of ads without tracking or the gathering of personal information. Less lucrative for Meta, but certainly a workable alternative.
And what happens if you stop paying eventually? You've just indicated to them that you're a juicy target to harvest data from, so you're even more fucked and are gonna get even worse privacy intrusions than ever before.
https://noyb.eu/sites/default/files/2023-11/Complaint%20-%20...