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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
They just don't get any benefit of the doubt anymore.
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.