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Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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