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Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don't agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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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.
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.