“[N]o Such fees are required to fund your services,” they argued. ““Pay or have no problem” means making a false choice between buying an ad-free experience or agreeing to pervasive tracking of our online lives and surveillance-based advertising. There is a third possibility, which is to present contextual ads that do not require personalized tracking and monitoring.research shows Contextual advertising can be almost as profitable as surveillance-based advertising. “
MEPs continue to urge the company Abolish “pay or consent” and “make your business compliant with the principles of the GDPR and respect the fundamental rights of EU citizens and residents”.
“The evolution of privacy and data protection is at a critical juncture, and all stakeholders, including tech giants like yourselves, must take responsibility for protecting these rights. We are deeply committed to safeguarding the integrity of the GDPR and ensuring that individuals are Retain real control over their personal data without coercion or discrimination.” Give him the task of upholding democratic values.
One of the signatories, Patrick Breyer, a member of the European Parliament from the Pirate Party, summed up Meta’s demand for “privacy fees” as “economic coercion.”
“Meta’s approach fails to seek genuine consent as required by the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], forcing users to accept it by making privacy unaffordable,” he said in a statement accompanying the letter. “The reason Meta insists on an illegal consent model is because its business model relies on pervasive tracking. We need a real alternative to tracking and targeted advertising, such as contextual advertising.”
MEPs are calling on Meta to respect EU law and abandon this cynical self-serving mechanism, while the company faces scrutiny from European Commission enforcers – who earlier this month asked Meta to send pay-or-benefit legalities prove. – Tracking options. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which applies to both Facebook and Instagram, requires platforms to obtain consent when using user data for advertising and stipulates that refusing consent must be as easy as providing consent.
A series of GDPR and consumer protection law complaints have also been made since Meta last fall transitioned from (unlawfully) claiming a legitimate interest in tracking users pervasively to launching an ad-free subscription to continue tracking users.
The cost of ad-free subscriptions charged by Meta was one of the issues targeted in the complaint, with MEPs arguing it was designed to make privacy unaffordable. For example, the privacy advocacy nonprofit noyb filed its first complaint in November.
For its part, Meta claims the fee is in line with other mainstream digital subscriptions. “As we have discussed previously, our current pricing is fully consistent with similar services offered by our competitors, such as YouTube Premium,” company spokesman Matthew Pollard said.
However, as we’ve pointed out before, this comparison is spurious given that Meta gets its content on Facebook and Instagram for free from users. Its ad-free subscription doesn’t sell access to premium and/or professional content like YouTube Premium (which bundles access to music streaming and original movies); or indeed news publications, which were among the first to implement it Sites with a “pay or good” strategy because they employ journalists to report and produce professional content.
noyb subsequently filed another GDPR complaint against Meta’s model, focusing on how easy it was for people to withdraw consent. There have also been a series of consumer protection complaints arguing that Meta’s practices breached EU consumer protection rules.
Finally, consumer rights groups have also filed a series of GDPR complaints against Meta’s “pay or OK” model.
While some EU data protection authorities may be reluctant to sanction embattled media outlets for promoting “payments or offers” to visitors to their websites, adtech giant Meta is another Something happened.
The European Data Protection Board will publish its opinion on “pay or consent” in the coming weeks, which may draw some de facto red lines, so it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.
The Commission’s work in this area will also be interesting as the Commission strengthens its DSA enforcement efforts. Just this week, the European Union sent a request to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn for information related to its use of data for ad targeting. As well as requiring platforms to obtain user consent to use personal data for advertising, the regulation also outright bans the use of sensitive data for ad targeting – an area where the Commission’s questions to LinkedIn also focus.
