The EU’s Data Protection Board (EDPB) has told large online platforms they should not offer users a binary choice between paying for a service and consenting to their personal data being used to provide targeted advertising.
In October last year, the social media giant said it would be possible to pay Meta to stop Instagram or Facebook feeds of personalized ads and prevent it from using personal data for marketing for users in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland. Meta then announced a subscription model of €9.99/month on the web or €12.99/month on iOS and Android for users who did not want their personal data used for targeted advertising.
At the time, Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb, said: “EU law requires that consent is the genuine free will of the user. Contrary to this law, Meta charges a ‘privacy fee’ of up to €250 per year if anyone dares to exercise their fundamental right to data protection.”
I mean tracking exists because advertisers pay more for targeted ads, based on the tracking. I’d rather prefer it if the EU just made tracking illegal. Deal with the problem at its root.
Also maybe ban ads that track clicking on them (to then give a bigger payout). Advertisers should pay for simply showing me the ad and putting their brand/product in my brain.
And if we remove the option for targeted ads based on user tracking, the price for plain and simple old school ads might rise again, which is a very good thing for websites and users.
We have to be real here, that nobody has ever really consented to being tracked in the way these giant sites do it. Nobody has looked at that form and gone “I’m perfectly OK with 1698 different advertising agencies knowing my real name and interests, every time I’m online”
They go “yeah, whatever, get that popup the fuck out of my face so I can read this fascinating article about some 19 year-old pop star’s boob job”.
Part of it should be legislation. Another part should be browsers rendering fingerprinting to be completely ineffective.
Opinion: “Personalized ads” are a ruse and don’t actually work better than regular ads. They only have a higher click-through rate because they are more often disguised as normal content on the platform and people are simply being tricked into clicking on them.