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Comment by WithinReason | Hacker News Reader

"Users therefore need to be provided with a yes/no ("opt-in") consent option, otherwise Meta may not use their data for personalized advertisement."

I guess Facebook's solution could be a pop-up asking whether you want to continue using it as before or if you want to deny access to your personal data and pay $50 a month.

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This would not be valid under GDPR, they would still need to have a tracking opt in for the "free" version. There are no loopholes to this.

I don't think this is true, many news sites either offer the option to accept cookies and show ads or offer a subscription without ads and tracking cookies.

This has been ruled as being valid by courts.

Sure but the free version doesn't have mandatory tracking, that's the point. Paid, ad free Facebook is orthogonal to this.

I'm not sure I ever got on such a website! They usually ask you to disable ad-blockers in order to accept ads, but they cannot force you to accept personalized ads.

Which would be within reason.

I don't see a problem paying for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. I used to pay for WhatsApp back in the day.

Heck, I even pay for WinRAR.

That would be wonderful. The only reason I wouldn't pay is that I have no trust in FB as a business given their history.

Honestly I would pay for a facebook subscription if it meant a better product

According to gdpr they must still offer the same service regardless of the user opt-in. Remains to be seen if FB can follow the GDPR there. Also not sure whether that point of GDPR is compatible with other kinds of trade agreements.

Probably they will go for "Please choose between 50 horrible autoplaying spammy ads or 4 personalized"

But wouldn't different ads be a different service?

No, under GDPR you can't coerce a user into give up their privacy in order to receive the service for free.

If they offer the service for free, the tracking still need to be opt in.

"But wouldn't different ads be a different service?" meaning wouldn't serving more annoying ads to the free tier be such coercion?

If this was true, every major German news website would violate the GDPR because that's exactly what they do. Can you cite the relevant GDPR article?

Those websites are in violation of the GDPR. Article 7 item 4:

“When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.”

This basically means that if providing the service is made conditional on consent of personal data processing despite the processing not being necessary for the service, then the consent can’t really be considered to be freely given.

That's a misconception. "Provision of a service" only means paid services and doesn't apply to websites offering content for free.

Doubt, as long as the content is the same

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