Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model
theregister.com
theregister.com
A) Facebook is free, but pay €9.99/mo. if you don't want ads or ad tracking
B) Facebook costs €9.99/mo., but will enable a free tier if you'll accept ads/tracking
Option A seems to provoke outrage (like this article/lawsuit), while option B seems... perfectly reasonable. Even though they're the same thing.
People just hate having stuff taken away from them. They feel that Facebook ought to be free because it always has been, the same way a lot of people are still bothered by checked baggage fees on airlines because checked baggage had been included for decades.
But legally, there's really no difference. And companies have to make money somehow. It would be fascinating if EU regulations actually led to the birth of an alternate, optional internet model where you paid $40/mo. extra to your ISP that got sent to Meta/Google/etc. according to your browsing proportions and resulted in no ads and no ad tracking across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, AdSense, etc.
There are the brokers that operate on a commission basis: you get the exchange price but pay a commission on each trade.
And there's the "free" brokers where there's no commission because it's already included in the spread. That is, the price you see is a resell of the original exchange price with broker's markup. I ain't fooled by "free" which can end up more expensive than transparently commissioned but maybe some people are.
It’s like selling dates. If you’re selling your time that’s fine, so a lunch dating experience is fine. However, if you bundle sex in with a ‘overnight experience’ that’s considered prostitution and illegal in many areas.
Facebook is likely in the same situation as drug dealers, prostitutes, assassins etc the existence of willing customers doesn’t make their business model legal. They can change their business model or change the law.
Of course if it’s possible that they win, but completely baseless lawsuits get dismissed.
I'm using empathy here, as someone who quit facebook 15 years ago. Saying it's easy to quit facebook is like saying it's easy to quit the gas company, or eating meat. You don't have to use natural gas, and you don't need meat.
Do you have a source for that? Because that would definitely be the crux of the issue then.
The article itself quotes:
> "In its ruling, the CJEU expressly recognised that a subscription model, like the one we are announcing, is a valid form of consent for an ads funded service."
which suggests that it is not illegal. But of course this depends on whether the "ads funded service" includes tracking.
I can't find any clear answers from a few quick google searches. Of course, the existence of this lawsuit suggests that the law itself may not yet be sufficiently clear, and so the judicial ruling will ultimately provide that clarity.
They just don't get any benefit of the doubt anymore.
Source, for example https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/consent/#:~:text=Consent%20must%....
or
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
or
https://www.bfdi.bund.de/EN/Buerger/Inhalte/Allgemein/Datens...
I doubt EU lawmakers planned for this approach to defeat privacy laws, it's definitely against the spirit but this will need an update. In FB case if you pay they 100% still track you anyway, they've been pretty clear they don't care even if they get caught.
Another angle against FB moving to a paid access system would be they could be considered public service due to how omnipresent the service is in day to day life, but lately it's probably more true for their other services like Insta or Whatsapp.
For example, the ICO link specifically states that it's OK to make a customer rewards loyalty card dependent upon tracking -- a clear exchange of allowing tracking explicitly in exchange for cash equivalents. That's still consent freely given.
A lot of the limits around consent are described with regards to employment, because there's an imbalance of power there. But that's irrelevant here.
The clearest prohibition is around "coupling", e.g. you can't make a purchase of an online grocery order contingent on sharing your data with third parties, because there's nothing "necessary" about that to fulfill the purpose.
But it seems pretty easy to make the case that tracking is "necessary" for fully effective advertising (ads without tracking perform much worse). So either subscribe for no ads (thus no tracking), or accept ads (and accept tracking). There doesn't seem to be any imbalance of power here, because you don't need to use Facebook the way you need to keep a job. Your consent is freely given, just like with a rewards card.
Although at the end of the day, the law does seems vague enough that it will be useful for a court decision to clarify it.
However, linking the lack of tracking with buying a zero advertising tier is clearly coupling not a discount. Consider the reverse what if someone wants to pay for zero advertising but is perfectly willing to have tracking. Thus we’ve discovered 4 possible decisions and FB is trying to artificially limit them.
Are the courts really supposed to mandate that FB provide 4 tiers instead of just 2?
We're already in checkbox hell with the various popups. And the notion of "coupling" is notoriously hard to define in practice.
It's precisely the vagueness around what is and isn't coupling, that I could see the courts going either way. I was really just arguing that it's not clear cut according to the law as written.
They can have 2 options advertising based with and without tracking, or 3 if they add paid without tracking etc.
It’s the same deal as wheelchair access. You don’t need to have stairs if you’ve got a ramp, but stairs alone doesn’t qualify as wheelchair accessible.
https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illega...
However, law is slow and it will take a while to propagate to more sites.
It doesn't seem to declare that the model is fundamentally illegal. Also, wouldn't that kind of decision need to be taken at the EU level? Because until then, you could have all sorts of inconsistencies between localities and countries.
> This is one of the dumbest things about GDPR and one of the reasons why the EU has a stagnant tech industry.
If progress means having to exist in a world without the GDPR, then I'm good stagnating.
And it makes sense that there is nothing like that in there. Subscriptions were totally irrelevant to the actual questions that the CJEU was asked to rule on in that case (which was e.g. a claim by the German competition authorities that it was impossible for anyone to freely consent to tracking by Meta due to them having a dominant market position, and a counter-claim that the competition authorities did not even have jurisdiction over a GDPR case).
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
- "this is free forever" (remember FaceBook moto), killing the market using this and then, when there's no nore competitor (on specific age class for example), saying "OK, now pay"
AND
- "this is a charged service, but you may access it for free as long as you respect some limitations" : in that case, from day-1, you know that either you'll have a basic service or you'll have to pay someday.
Note: in the second case, when a "free tier" is degraded to force people to pay, it's the same problem as Facebook...
In fact, I think that the real problem here - and what people are fed up with - is the bait-and-switch
1) I promise that I'll promise something for free forever 2) People trust me and invest in me... so I kill the market 3) Then, when there's no real competitor, I try to charge
Even for capitalist, this way of doing business is just: how to build a monopoly to evade the market competition
So yeah... let's sue Facebook... and make it a clear example for all businesses around the world that this way of doing things is definetly NOT OKAY
I guess this case will clarify whether that's true.
If the EU really wants to ban ad-supported sites, they should just come out and do it.
no, it's because of the predatory manner in which these fees are presented. they hook you on the cheap price of the ticket, and then whack you in the head with the fees so that the actual cost of the trip is no where near the advertised ticket price. much like ticketmaster, airbnb, resorts, and any other industry with these additional charges
All fees and taxes posted up front with a grand total below them. And preferably some check boxes to include or remove some fees from the calculation if they are or are not relevant to your particular situation.
At the very least some warning that additional fees exist and will be calculated at checkout or whatever isn't too much to ask.
You don't actually need tracking for ads.
There are a lot of business models that are feasible with tracking for ads, but are not feasible to offer for free without tracking.
Option B is what some German online newspapers have been doing, and so far it's held in the lower courts, but there's been no binding precedent at national or Europe-wide level. If that were confirmed at a higher level, then legally, there would be a very big difference between Options A and B.
A recent ruling on behavioural advertising seems to suggest that Option B may not be in accord with the law either, and that's certainly what the NOYB lawsuit claims.
This isn't entirely true. Companies didn't reduce ticket fares at the same time when they rolled out baggage fees. It was a de-facto price increase for many travelers.
A) Pay 9.99. No tracking.
B) Ads. No tracking.
C) Ads. Tracking. For that consent is required.
The point is that consent needs to be voluntary to be valid. That is the huge legal difference. Pretty simple concept, but unpopular with advertisers.
So the comparison with A) is a red herring to distract from the lack of consent.
Are we talking 1% or are we talking 50%?
(What if tracking-based ads are actually less effective, as in: "I'm hesitant to click on an ad that keeps following me around"; "I've already bought this thing, will you please stop showing me this ad?"; etc)
A) Pay the 10 euros a month, no ads, no tracking whatsoever
B) Don't pay the 10 euros a month, get ads, but no tracking if you don't EXPLICITLY consent to it. Ads != tracking, they can exist without invasive tracking.
C) Don't pay the 10 euros, get ads and assuming you don't care about tracking you consent to it. You get more personalized ads in exchange for this, which for some people I guess is a good deal
Instead, what's happening is:
A) Pay the 10 euros a month, get no ads, but still get tracked (let's be real here, it's Meta we're talking about)
B) Don't pay, you have no option but to consent to being tracked and being shown ads. This is what's illegal. If they don't want users to have a chance to voice their consent, then they should close down shop in the EU and only offer their services to paying customers, but we all know Meta doesn't want to lose out on the 2nd largest market in the world.
Maybe, juuuuust maybe, putting the phrase, "It's free, and always will be," right next to where you log in for eleven years wasn't the smartest of ideas.
this isn't confusing.
As to if there are bigger fights to fight. Probably. But noyb has chosen to fight this fight, and I think that is fine. Someone else will have to pick up the other fights.
Thus instantly began a circus of bad faith by countless companies.
Maybe it's time to just plain outlaw everything for which "cookie consent" UI make a show of getting consent. Doing a cookie consent UI would also be illegal.
Like (many places) prostitution is illegal, and soliciting it is illegal.
And what happens if you stop paying eventually? You've just indicated to them that you're a juicy target to harvest data from, so you're even more fucked and are gonna get even worse privacy intrusions than ever before.
The decision was quick: content quality and quantity on Facebook in no way compares to YouTube, once I take out the Reels, Instagram and TikTok ripoffs (which are mostly available on YouTube as well), there's very little left.
Text content is abysmal, particularly when the reference is Hacker News. Links to retarded news sites and magazines which present one line of "content" which merely repeats the all-caps title spread across 15 pages of seizure-inducing advert horror.
Literally most of the use is to keep in touch with old and estranged acquaintances but that's not worth 6 or 10 euro per month they were charging for ad free.
edit: not correct. Closer to $20 per month per user in the US for FB actually.
For Facebook is would be either 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, or 4% of said revenue.
A bit bigger than a rounding error.
Even when they got close to actually getting a deterring fine, the corrupt Irish DPA bailed them out: https://noyb.eu/en/irish-data-protection-authority-gives-eu-...
This is somewhat incorrect. In Europe (which this is about), Facebook's average revenue per user is about $70 per year (~$6/mo), and in the US it's around $232 (~$19/mo). Taking into account the additional overhead of collecting payments from individual users, support, etc., it's definitely not orders of magnitude away.
All data from Meta's last annual report: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/e574646...
Yes it is most likely to be less but not a factor of 3 simply based on purchasing power alone.
The delta there shows what that's worth.
Please don't confuse things. FB users aren't FB's customers. FB doesn't get any money directly from the (on average just a little bit) richer US users.
Culture may differ, but human brains work the same in the end.
I think a lot of people have a mental model based on the size of these companies that they must be making hundreds of dollars a month per user, and it's good to run the numbers to show they don't so society can make more reasonable plans.
Server costs for images, text, and the occasional video can't be that high per user at Facebook's scale of billions.
But costs for the Rube Goldberg machine of ad hosting, recommendations, bidding, and serving? There's a whole lot of backend infra and middleware behind that. We should assume, at the very least, that ad-free users are cheaper for Facebook (unless they go through all of the backend recommendation processes for all users but simply hide ads from ad-free users). I assume that with some optimization ad-free users ought to be significantly cheaper to serve.
This is not what this is.
It's paying or seeing ads. Tracking is done anyway. For the ads they do still sell on other platforms.
What should really be the case is to have untracked ads as an option instead of targeted ones.
Of course, this sort of thing happens in basically every other aspect of our lives, but depending on how the law is written it may or may not be legal. For example, the rich can afford safer cars, but there are still minimum safety requirements. Presumably a car company could release a cheap car without seat belts, ABS brakes, etc. The market may like this, but it may not be allowed under the law.
A company may charge whatever they want for non-ad or non-tracking plans, but if they are priced out of the reach of most people, they may not be following intent of the law or how it is written.
Of course there's also the moral argument as well, but I'm guessing you were thinking more of the legal/economic side.
Personally, I block all the ads and tracking, use a specific browser for whenever I browse facebook under a fake account so paying $10 a month is not worth it to me.
I maybe would pay if it was like $2 but at the same time I don't really use Meta products to actually pay for it. I agree that the price is ridiculously high but at the same time I can't blame them. At least they finally give users a choice, something I never thought would happen.
Me paying for it, now, that's an interesting proposition.
Although the “appropriateness” of the fee may be called into question, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Facebook will successfully argue that with operating costs of around 6 billion per month, and around 3 billion MAU (i.e. around 2 USD/user), with good SaaS margins expected to be around 80%, a charge of around 10 USD per month is not “inappropriate”, which is almost exactly what they’re charging.
I don't think there is a case to be made against Meta here. What alternative did the group envision exactly? The company has to make money somehow, so "free and private" is off the table. That leaves us with the option "pay or your account gets deactivated", but who benefits from this solution?
A lot of people are mentioning the possibility of ads without tracking or the gathering of personal information. Less lucrative for Meta, but certainly a workable alternative.
I wonder what make a right fundamental or not?
Some right, like the right to life, is illegal to sell.. You can't let others kill you in exchange of money.
UN list "right to education", which, is not that universal.. You can't get unlimited education without paying.
Well, of course there is a document for that (see "Article 8"): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12...
> Some right, like the right to life, is illegal to sell.
Every "real" right can't be sold, if you could it wouldn't be a right. That's why it is for example impossible to give away or sell your copyright in the EU.
> You can't get unlimited education without paying.
That's why the formulation in the EU paper is as follows:
Article 14
Right to education
1. Everyone has the right to education and to have access to vocational and continuing training.
2. This right includes the possibility to receive free compulsory education.
3. The freedom to found educational establishments with due respect for democratic principles and the right of parents to ensure the education and teaching of their children in conformity with their religious, philosophical and pedagogical convictions shall be respected, in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of such freedom and right.https://noyb.eu/sites/default/files/2023-11/Complaint%20-%20...
- why has meta not asked before for consent?*
- how did they pay their business until now?
- why is it so expensive?
*Information privacy doesn't count obviously
- from selling ads
- it’s about equal to your value as an ad viewer
Being an advertiser with a targeted portfolio and control over the marketplace is HUGELY profitable. Companies keep sticking ads in things for a reason, and Google and Facebook are multi-billion-dollar companies off of the ads and tracking alone.
I like this idea.