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Comment by mapcars | Hacker News Reader

> while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model, which requires that European Union users pay to access ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram

Wait, isn't pretty much all web content is like this nowadays? You have to buy youtube premium to avoid ads, how is it different?

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Pay or have your information harvested and sold. Its extortion.

You’re missing a third option there, which makes it not extortion.

If the third way is "don't use the product" facebook have that covered too... they will harvest and sell your personal information.

I may be misreading it, but I believe the third option the EU is expects from Meta is non-targeted advertising.

Nobody was holding a gun up to my head forcing me to open Facebook or give them money

You must be either broke and/or paranoid. If it matters to you, pay up. If it doesn't, you get to use a service for free.

Who does Facebook sell data to?

"Harvested and processed to add cohort tags to include in advertisement real-time bidding contests so advertisers can know how much to bid", while more precise, isn't as punchy as "harvested and sold".

So it's not literally sold?

I've been confused about this for a while. Given data is what allows them a unique advantage for their advertising product, it seemed odd that Facebook would sell that data to others.

But to hear people talk, a company could literally buy personal information from Facebook.

Yeah, that makes sense. Facebook wants the data so they can provide more accurate advertising "cohorts". The accuracy is the value that other people see, hence "selling" the data even though they're really selling an ad view.

So not sold. Also not your data. It is Facebook's data. It belongs to Facebook. You don't own it just because it happens to be about you.

Does someone own the Wikipedia page about them?! No, Wikipedia does.

YouTube allows you to disable personalized ads.

https://www.youtube.com/intl/en_us/howyoutubeworks/user-sett...

They are saying that there should be the option where you don't get your data harvested and are shown ads without your privacy being violated.

> You have to buy youtube premium to avoid ads

Or you can block the ads in the browser for free. In this case, you have to consent being tracked (or pay) or otherwise the page will not display.

It’s not about being shown ads, it’s about collecting (and sharing to third parties) private information that goes beyond the technically required amount to use the service. GDPR says companies need to get my consent in order to do that, that I am free to not give this consent and that a service can’t not be provided to me just because I don’t give this consent. Facebook and a bunch of other companies said “aha! We’ll just create a paid alternative!” but this doesn’t comply with the law. It just took a while to take this through the courts but if you read the law it’s clear they just stalled for time on this one.

Thanks for clarifying, it was confusing to figure that out from the article

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