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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

To be honest Facebook should offer a tracking free version with paid subscription. It is not acceptable that the only way to use Facebook and contact your family is to sacrifice your own and theirs privacy. When are we going to have a regulator step in and tackle this? It doesn't seem that GDPR has helped much, so I think more radical steps are needed. Such tracking that is being done online would be illegal offline (stalking), so I don't see how long this is going to go. It's not sustainable.

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I don't think that such a paid subscription would be feasible. Facebook currently earns more than 150 $/year on ads for each of their US/Canada user on average; and iPhone users who would be willing to pay for such services probably are worth more than the average, so the appropriate market-determined fee to replace invasive ad targeting would be quite large.

I don't think people would be willing to pay for tracking-free Facebook more than they pay for Netflix.

I don't think profits of a private company should be a justification for such invasion of privacy. There is plenty of ways they could make it work, but we need a legislation to compel them to do so. That option should be mandated by law even if it turned out to be niche.

iPhone users are probably among Facebook's most valuable advertising demographic (ie. lots of disposable income). Apple's decisions to block tracking are hurting them in a big way, and offering a paid subscription probably won't seem attractive to users if Facebook prices it at the full value lost.

We've trained people that everything is free. We can't get away from that now that the genie is out of the bottle. Furthermore, people might just decide Facebook isn't worth it for them at the level of functionality they provide. As more churn happens, the overall value of the network decreases.

Apple just checkmated Facebook.

This has nothing to do with tracking to target ads. Facebook doesn't need Apple to execute that, people share data with FB voluntarily.

This is about measuring the impact of advertising while following a standard published by Apple itself and covering the usecase of big marketplaces with sub stores in it.

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