Consent must be freely given under EU law, not given in exchange for not having to pay money. You can't give a discount on the services for consenting.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/apple-google-and...
On a certain level I agree with you: it goes against the spirit of the law and it's downright rude (effectively blackmailing readers).
This said, the alternative is that they go full-paywall (and risk death, when less than 1% of readers will actually bother to sign up).
What you described may be out there as well, I just haven't stumbled on it personally.
Good. They'll be replaced with others that can either provide enough value that people don't mind paying for them or can reduce their costs to survive without tracking like they did before the Internet. Win/win either way.
I don’t know how but at some point as a society we decided that we must tip a restaurant 25% after tax, but the newspapers aren’t worth a dime. I also don’t understand why they have to be all $25 per month now. I don’t think they were ever so profitable to being with.
Absolutely. The main difference is that I could decide, day by day, whether I wanted to read newspaper A or B, or nothing at all; now I have to pledge monthly contributions to one paper, which are often very hard to cancel.
The industry cannot get their act together to solve microtransactions, and that's their doom; if a few major newspapers pooled together to, say, subsidize a browser feature that gives us back that model, they wouldn't be in the dire shape they're in now.
> at some point as a society we decided that we must tip a restaurant 25%
As an American society maybe, tips in Europe are not as common nor expected.
b) If someone handed me a newspaper I was not expected to pay for it as well.
c) The newspaper dosn't fucking track you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38192620
But the answer is: pay or consent "does not achieve the objective of preventing the accumulation of personal data by gatekeepers". See https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_... (also linked via the tweet elsewhere in this discussion)
Same issue on the Apple side will play out probably similar; either they can charge every developer some technology fee, or they cannot charge to anyone.
Maybe in theory, but in practice they are one and the same. The CPM on ads where you don't know the audience is so low that you might as well skip the ads entirely.
> Same issue on the Apple side will play out probably similar; either they can charge every developer some technology fee, or they cannot charge to anyone.
Yes, and the result for both will be that there is no free tier in the EU anymore. All EU developers will pay the CTF and all EU users will pay $10/month for for ad-free FB.
And that's a good thing! If people really get value out of Facebook, they'll pay for it. If Facebook cannot deliver value without invading their users privacy and selling their data, maybe their business premise was flawed in the first place. Is it so alien to accept that the era of "free" online services might end after all?
Regarding the CTF specifically: I don't think Apple will get away with this after all, but we'll see.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
– Banksy
Your case only valid with "zero consent" case. This is proved with Apple's tracking protection for apps already; given that you have some x% of users consenting to tracking, CPM value for non-tracking users are within 85-95% range.
Contextual Advertising is also a thing, see CarbonAds and others
It has; it directly violates my privacy by tracking me against my will. This implies collecting data about me without my consent.
> The app is already tracking your every move to serve relevant content.
Which is also illegal under the GDPR: An app may not track anything it doesn't immediately require to provide a value to the user, it may not track anything it didn't get explicit consent to track, and must disclose why it is tracking what, how, why, as well as where and how long it keeps that data.
> Serving relevant ads is the same thing and is no more of an infringement on your privacy.
Serving relevant ads is fine, if you can do it within the boundaries I described in the previous paragraph. If you cannot, you cannot do this legally in the EU. There is no wiggle room here; apparently some people refuse to understand that some American business practices are simply not feasible in the EU - period.
Do societies have rights? Where are these rights defined, and how are they limited (if they are at all)? Are you talking about constitutions (and therefore states), or 'international law'?
As to whether or not, they have a right to make laws? I think that’s outside of the scope of this discussion because they clearly already made the law and meta isn’t challenging their right to do so.
I was replying to a comment, not directly addressing Meta.
The bottom line is that all rights are an invention.
The reason I think it's reasonable to limit your right to sell yourself as a slave is because if it wasn't limited then a lot of people in very precarious economic situations would sell themselves and there would be a very real interest in creating those situations to force more people into slavery. You can see that with the usurious interest charged by payday loan companies. Usury is also usually illegal in civilized societies for a similar reason.
Similarly you shouldn't be allowed to abrogate your right to privacy because it creates an incentive to force other people to do so as well.
Then... pay for it?
1. Pay
2. Give them data
3. Do not use
Why are people not allowed to consent to (2)?
If you're an EU citizen then you can lobby both sets of representatives. If you're not then this isn't really any of your business.
Like, I hate that the NSA can slurp up all my data, but as a non US citizen I have limited ability to prevent this.
I mean like it's their right as a government to say 'you can't charge for consent. either charge everyone or no-one', but I wonder how it'll all pan out.
[1](https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/28/meta-consent-or-pay-consum...)
But the issue I find here is that Meta has not premiered this technique, the first offenders were Italian digital newspapers either requiring your data or a subscription.
In an ideal world the rules and regulations companies have to follow would be strongly correlated against their size, with penalties growing increasingly harsh for violations. In reality, it's the exact opposite. Small companies can get destroyed by even minor rule violations, whereas massive corporations will endlessly litigate out even absolutely overt violations, and even when they lose the cases after dragging them out endlessly, the penalties they face are entirely inconsequential - a few days of revenue at worst. That's just so wrong on so many levels.
That they won’t release such products despite the demand shows they’re just evil. They believe they can squeeze more money and power out of ever-increasing surveillance.