Meta’s approach of ‘pay for your privacy’ is wrong | Hacker News Reader

Meta’s approach of ‘pay for your privacy’ is wrong

tuta.com

81 pointsgrammers96 comments

Many people here are conflating the idea of paying versus ads, whilst the discussion is about privacy instead.

There's nothing wrong with charging money for a service or alternatively let them watch ads. The problem is that the ads are tracking ads. If they would be simple contextual ads (dynamic based on surrounding content), there would be no privacy violation and thus no issue.

I believe the EU direction is that when you decline tracking, it should have no meaningful impact on your experience. Because if that would be the case, there's no real "free consent". Again, declining tracking is not the same as declining ads. Privacy should not cost money to secure, it should be a default and is a basic human right.

Facebook obviously disagrees.

It’s really not that hard. If you care about your privacy, don’t use products that don’t coincide with your beliefs

It's really not that hard. Under GDPR you have a right to privacy, and companies can't demand you give it up as part of some kind of condition to gain access to their service.

And Facebook came up with a reasonable alternative - you can exchange your money for the service.

They came up with an illegal alternative. If they want to run a paid service, fine, but they can't make avoiding tracking contingent on payment.

Okay they can force everyone to pay in the EU. Would that make the regulators happy? Would that make the users happy?

It’s not always as easy. E.g. some small business owners must either maintain a social media presence on popular platforms or lose a significant part of their profits.

Having all users protected by default sounds ideal to me.

and how many small businesses are enabled by being able to target thier audience based on their demographic data?

Users are protected - no one is forced to go to Facebook and businesses have been operating for centuries without social media.

Privacy is not a belief, it is law.

And Facebook said users in the EU can pay. Do you really think users are happy with that?

No, and they won't pay. They'll just hit "accept tracking" and carry on.

And that's exactly the point the EU is making: it's not truly free consent.

So people used their own free will to make a choice that the government doesn’t agree with and therefore a law is needed?

It's worth noting that Meta famously created shadow profiles. Not using a site is not sufficient when your data is for sale or sitting in some unsecured manner, waiting to be stolen.

Who would trust them? Even if one paid to not be tracked, they will still be tracked and that info will generate revenue. Once it's found out, they will pay a pittance fine and continue to track whomever they like.

Source: That's literally how businesses work..outside...right now.

In the real world it's not that simple. I'd love to close down my WhatsApp account - the only Meta service I've ever used - but unfortunately my employer requires us all to be in a WhatsApp group. I don't really have a choice in the matter if I want to get paid.

X is another tough one. Many politicians and public services use it as their primary channel for announcements. I've been using Nitter as a workaround ever since Elon blocked reading feeds without an account, but I feel like I shouldn't need to.

In that case create a work WhatsApp profile that’s separate from your personal info.

Sounds like your work needs to provide you hardware to support their restrictions.

I remember when Facebook first came out. Someone told me, "join this cool social network".

I was curious and took a look...at their privacy policy. After one reading, I closed the browser and never joined to this day.

What a horrible company. May they burn.

This. I have never owned a Facebook account, a fact I am glad about.

How do you know someone doesn’t have a Facebook account? You don’t actually need to search for them on Facebook, they’ll surely tell you about it everywhere else.

You're mistaking us for vegans :)

Meta still built a profile on you based off your friends posting. I believe that this is what got them into trouble in the US (shadow accounts).

Do you use Google? YouTube? Own an Android phone?

When I joined Facebook, I also read their privacy policy, and sent an email to them complaining about it. Dustin Moskovitz answered, saying not to worry, they copied it verbatim from Friendster, so it was fine...

They run an expensive service! Ballpark their (hypothetical) “AWS costs” at the scale and latency at which they operate. Someone has to pay for it. If not the users, then the advertisers.

If the advertisers, Meta is going to be accountable to advertisers to an extent in terms of what they measure and report and that requires data. Is this even hard to understand??? If this were your service, you would have exactly the same two options to pay for it.

If you don’t like Meta or advertisers having data about you, don’t use Meta’s services!

Acting like there is some “human right to use Instagram on your own terms” is deeply mysterious to me. There isn’t. You know how the deal works. You get the service and they advertise to you.

Well, the deal is indeed they advertise to me. But they may not tell "you pay with your privacy or your money". That's the law. There are other forms of advertising that are not based on my private data. Those forms of advertising pay less? That's the problem of Meta, not mine.

If you don’t like Meta or advertisers having data about you, don’t use Meta’s services!

Meta famously created "shadow profiles" of people who didn't use their services.

And avoiding facebooks SDKs and whatever is ultra hard

And yet specifically disallowed people from creating second facebook accounts to use on their Quests specifically so that they could separate their social accounts from the purchases.

I think a lot of people have been so engrossed in social media for so long that they genuinely don't know what they would do without it. It is an integral part of their life.

In fairness, if all your friends and family use a particular platform to communicate, I can see why people might feel that way. Not that it gives anyone a right to use the platform on their own desired terms but I can understand why it would be a big deal if the main method of communication with friends and family were to come with deeply disagreeable terms and conditions.

But as you say, someone needs to pay for it. To me it's healthy to normalise paying with cash for the services we consume as at least it is transparent and helps to ensure an alignment of interests. My main concern is that it results in a two-tiered approach where the well-off can afford privacy and the poor can't.

> If you don’t like Meta or advertisers having data about you, don’t use Meta’s services!

This isn't really practical when Meta collects information about people who don't even have an account.

Well I left facebook partially because their ads were so constantly irrelevant despite them tracking me around the net.

So their server costs to advertise to me is zero, but they still pay server costs to track me around the net. I see this as a good thing

The problem with Meta is wider than their relationship with their users and advertisers. Many sites that contain "Facebook like" buttons etc allow Meta tracking anyone that browses these sites, profiling, and serving personalised ads even if said people never signed up to Facebook or any other Meta service.

You can act as if this was some philosophical debate, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re talking about laws here. EU citizens have a right to privacy. You cannot offer customers to give up this right in exchange for your product, exactly the same way as you cannot offer customers to enslave themselves in exchange for something. That is plain and simply illegal.

The entire discussion ends at this point. If Meta isn’t able to offer the service on compatible conditions, they cannot offer that service in the EU.

YouTube premium allows watching content without ads for a similar price. It's unlikely that they actually stop Google trackers for youtube premium users though so you pay and get no privacy benefit.

Assuming that a different content medium, Facebook actually implements a subscription that removes ads and trackers, that would be a win, wouldn't it?

If anything I'd be shocked if they didn't sell the data of those who paid. If you pay for Facebook you have more money than you know what to do with, the list of users who do so are the Glengarry leads that every sales org would desparately want.

Wasn't Meta the company that started using 2-factor phone numbers for targets of advertisements?

None of the major ad tech companies “sell your data”. They sell access to you based on the data that they have. The data they have on you is much too valuable to sell.

This is correct. They give your data for free to a group of advertisers and let them bid on who will pay the most to show you an ad.

They do no such thing. The advertisers never have your data. The advertisers tell Facebook which demographic they want to target and Facebook obliges.

Not using Facebook is free and protects your privacy. What Meta claims it does and does not do with it's users data is unproveable.

Not using Instagram or WhatsApp in 2023 comes with significant social costs.

… not using instagram has social costs?

(I lived in a place where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, but honestly I don’t even know if I know someone who uses instagram and it’s certainly not used socially meaning with people I socialise face-to-face)

Instagram is the default DM platform for young adults in my experience. When I meet new people in non-business contexts they always ask for my IG username (which I of course don’t have).

Where in the world is this?

Depends where you live. Brazil is not Japan.

In non-WhatsApp ubiquitous places, “what’s your IG?” is the standard when you meet someone in the wild. You can always go with “oh, just WhatsApp me!”, but then again you’re still on Meta. I’m talking about age range till like 35ish, probably.

Also, significant chunk of people don’t use Instagram/Facebook for posts, but just like another messaging app. I basically have my notifications enabled for DMs, and not that interested in content scrolling.

Maybe if you're a teenager or in your early twenties, and dependent on where you live. But as a thirty-something year old my social life is doing just fine without Fuckerberg and his dumb apps.

It ain’t free and is sometimes not possible at all. At work, I’m admin of everything, by Meta’s own privacy policy I’m not allowed having an account which is not mine. Not having a WhatsApp account is very hard these days. I manage to do it but it ain’t free in the sense that I’m missing on a lot of group chats I would otherwise be in, and sometimes I’m still in it via my wife. Not being on a social network also prevents me from seeing photos of me posted by someone else, where I might be tagged! It’s never as easy as “if you don’t like it just don’t use it,” especially for social networks.

So it’s not possible because your friends won’t contact you any other way. It’s very possible not to have WhatsApp - only around 20% of the population in the US use it.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/558290/number-of-whatsap...

Having a belief system never comes without sacrifice.

Not everyone is from the US... In Latam, whatsapp is ubiquitous.

“All of my friends go some place where I don’t agree with their policies. Therefore the place should change their policies”.

Ha! Remember when Facebook had this motto on its login page: "It's free and always will be"?

Of course, you either pay with money or with your data. But still it's a bit ironic.

Well, it's still as free as it used to be since the subscription model is opt-in

Aren't they being forced to? If you restrict access to valuable personal data of your users for targeted ads, you reduce how much each customer is worth. At a certain point the unit economics don't make sense. So what else can they do? Just shut down the service?

Yes, if you can’t make your business model work while following the law, you should shut down.

Or you change your business model. FB is doing just that.

Is it really that big of a revenue difference per-user only serving non-targeted ads?

Definitely yes. Non targeted ads tanks click through rates which directly reduces price per ad impression. Not surprised if this is a xx% hit.

According to some articles I found from Google, already retargeted ads (someone went to an ecommerce shop, showed interested in a product, but didn't buy it, gets shown this product on another website), already has 10x difference in CTR compared to normal display ads which I think also take into consideration your likely demographic and interests. So even larger difference between completely random ads.

Put it another way. If at any given time you could be interested about 1 thing out of 100, if you are shown random ads, the value difference is 100x compared to if you were able to accurately identify the 1 out of 100.

So then consider that when you go to other websites, with FB code embedded within them, some of them e-commerce sites, they will be able to retarget those ads, which you already showed at least slight interest in. This is likely a huge difference.

You already showed interest in that gaming mouse, but for whatever reason you decided you would buy it later or not now, maybe forgetting all about it eventually, but then you see that ad to remind you. That's a huge difference.

Then there are weird freaks like me who, either through natural response[0] or habituation, buy approximately nothing unless it's necessary and therefore bring in zero money to anyone who paid to put an advert in front of my eyeballs…

[0] Amusic individuals have diminished or absent emotional responses to music, and describe music as "unpleasant" or as "annoying, noise".

This is how I regard adverts.

Normal ads are perfectly fine to show, so it's only the privacy violation that's in question.

I genuinely don't think you should have even the ability to give up your privacy, for the same reason we don't allow people to sell themselves into slavery, or give up the right to a fair trial, or give up your freedom of speech, even if it's clearly written out in a ToS that you are giving up those things.

I think there should be a bunch of fundamental rights that all humans have, and there should not be the possibility of selling or give those rights up.

You very much have the ability to and are encouraged by the government to give up your right to a fair trial. It’s called a plea bargain and over 90% of cases never go to trial in the US.

You are also allowed to give up your freedom of speech - it’s called a non disclosure agreement.

And from my reading of it, the GDPR agrees and the whole "Data or money" thing is actually not "freely given consent" and thus void. But sadly, the data protection officers are really dragging their feet here and don't bring this to the courts. Might be because the big European publishing houses seem to all have adopted this strategy and they have a powerfull lobby. And just as facebook, most of them set ridiculous prices because they just want you to say yes to all data harvesting instead.

The challenge that they’re up against is, nobody wants to pay for “normal” non-targeted ads. The death of normal ads was called the “adpocalypse” and it took down some pretty major web properties who didn’t adapt. Dr Dobbs Journal was one of them.

What is a normal non targeted ad?

If a feminine hygiene company has to show non targeted ads to 50% men, who benefits? They have to advertise more than twice as much, Facebook can't charge as much, and I get weird irrelevant ads that make my experience worse.

Can you be more specific about what you mean?

Can Facebook know that for instance I am a man, or I live in the US, or that I speak English? What is the line?

Ive never seen a practical model for what "privacy" means in this regard. Of course targeted ads are not new, as advertisments you see in Vogue is different than those in Men's Fitness and different that those in Jet.

So happy to consider the idea that privacy is something that can't be sold no matter the price as long as you have a coherent model of what privacy is

In the old days you had to pay the phone company for them to not list your full name, home address and phone number in the phone book that every household had.

I'm willing to pay, but what they're asking is too much, given that it's per account (FB and IG accounts are apparently not the same account). It seems very intentional, too. Even the way the in-app texts are constructed, it seems they really don't want me to pay.

Yes, I tried it for a month and it's undeniably better, but too expensive. €1/month and no Suggested posts, please.

The law is what the courts say it is. Many German newspapers have gone with the "we're a paid service but we'll offer it for free if you consent to tracking" approach, which has so far held in the lower courts, but hasn't (last time I checked) been decided in the equivalent of the Supreme Court, neither in Germany nor EU-wide. Facebook would be a good test case for this.

That said, if you run facebook in a separate browser profile or container, or even have a good tracker-blocking list and extension running and don't let FB set third-party cookies, then it's a lot harder for them to track you off the platform. You then just need to decide how much of your life you put on FB itself.

At the risk of stating the obvious:

- It’s fine to offer a paid service and an ad supported free tier.

- It’s not fine to always personalize ads; this should be opt in (with an option to withdraw consent at any time and without costs).

I'm surprised anyone actually believes that paying will mean that Meta doesn't collect tracking data about you as opposed to flipping a bit in a database somewhere that says "don't show personalized ad content". The latter is simpler and gives Meta a nice profile to use for targeting ads if/when you stop paying.

Does facebook actually sell data? I know you can run ads, but the suggested practice currently is to leave the ad interests open and let the algorithm figure out the best users for conversions.

Second, tracking likes and comments is required to offer the service you can't show likes and comments without it.

And I bet that most of actually ad data is just weights in a neural network not even readable by humans.

Online versions of all German printed media do exactly the same, I wonder how it's going to be different. And $10 a month is not that much of an unreasonable fee compared to EU price level.

The thing is, that I do not trust meta not to do shady stuff with my data, regardless if I pay or not. History has shown, that they could not care less about privacy. Also, how would I, as an EU citizen even control that there are keeping my data save?

> Also, how would I, as an EU citizen even control that there are keeping my data save?

How you would do that with a EU-based company? You can sue a EU-based company, sure, but you can also sue Facebook Ireland, can't see how it's different.

Do you think newspapers and magazines haven’t been selling your data for decades?

What are you talking about? I can easily access multiple German newspapers and read their articles, without paying and also without having a personal profile that harvest personal information.

Well, I've just opened FAZ for example. A popup appears giving me two options:

> Wie gewohnt mit Werbung lesen Nutzen Sie FAZ.NET mit personalisierter Werbung, Werbetracking, Nutzungsanalyse und externen Multimedia-Inhalten. Details zu Cookies und Verarbeitungszwecken sowie zu Ihrer jederzeitigen Widerrufsmöglichkeit finden Sie unten, im Cookie-Manager sowie in unserer Datenschutzerklärung.* Für diese Nutzung gelten unsere Bereitstellungsbedingungen. Zugriff auf mit F+ gekennzeichnete Artikel weiterhin nur mit Bezahlabo F+.

And

> Werbefrei mit F.A.Z. Pur lesen Lesen Sie FAZ.NET fokussiert nahezu ohne Werbung und ohne Werbetracking für 4,99 € / 4 Wochen, als Abonnent zum Vorzugspreis von 2,99 € / 4 Wochen. Schließen Sie jetzt das F.A.Z. Pur-Abo ab. Zugriff auf mit F+ gekennzeichnete Artikel weiterhin nur mit Bezahlabo F+.

Pay or be tracked and served personalized ads. Not that much different from what Facebook offers.

I think I would pay if facebook could somehow _prove_ they don't track me.

I don't think they could do that. I, therefore, haven't pay yet.

Are they intentionally conflating privacy with ads? They are still going to harvest your data either way.

I'm not entirely sure the article gets it right either.

You're not paying to have your privacy respected. Your data will still be processed in the same way. You are paying to not have adverts.

I'm pretty sure that the Terms of Service are almost identical. You still will get binned into person of type x, y & z. the only difference is that advertisers won't see you.

Its not exactly adding +1 to privacy.

edit the reason this gets around GDPR is that whilst your data is still being processed, the product is not being shared with third parties.

well, tuta's business model seem to boil down to "vendor lock in"

I say this as a paying customer, but I'll admit I haven't decided how I feel about the new plans (as announced together with the name change) so maybe my opinion is outdated

well, tuta's business model seem to boil down to "vendor lock in" (from my viewpoint, I pay for their service and I haven't decided how I feel about the new plans so maybe my opinion is outdated)

I want Facebook to die. It is a terrible stain on humanity.

Twitter/X enters the chat. I've deleted all social apps from my phone except Facebook, and the only reason I use that is to share photos with elderly relatives.

At least I don't get unsolicited racism and gore in my Facebook feed. Twitter on the other hand has been so utterly awful over the last two months that it finally pushed me to delete it everywhere. I don't go looking for that kind of stuff, yet somehow the Algorithm promotes it.

Major mental gymnastics.

If you want to use their products, either be served ads, pay to go ad free. Nothing special.

People accept the choice between untracked/unpersonalized ads and payment. The issue has always been the level of personalized tracking involved, which many people believe should be illegal (and many believe is already illegal in some juristictions).

Major mental gymnastics.

Do you want your service to be available to European customers? Play by their rules or withdraw. Nothing special.

> Play by their rules

Which they are.

So they say. TFA has a different take. It remains to be seen which interpretation will hold legally.

This is them playing by their rules.

The ruling says "if necessary...". This swings both ways: It is not necessary to charge, and also not possible, due to the GDPR.

Faecbook can run ads, and support their business, and do it without profiling everyone.

Have free: non personalized ad supported. Have paid: no ads.

FB making it clear here that they really want and need your data.

Do Data Deletion Requests solve this issue under GDPR? Just keep sending them their way and let them deal with them.

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