“Freely given” consent at a high price? Under EU law, consent to online tracking and personalized advertising is only valid if it is “freely given”. This is to ensure that users only give up their fundamental right to privacy if it is their genuine free will to do so. Meta has now implemented the exact opposite of a genuinely free choice: Facebook alone will introduce a “privacy fee” of up to €12.99 per month if users do not consent to their personal data being processed for targeted advertising. Each linked account (such as Instagram) will cost another €8, making a total of €251.88 a year for one person using Instagram and Facebook. By comparison: Meta says its average revenue per user in Europe between Q3 2022 and Q3 2023 was $16.79. This equates to an annual revenue of just €62,88 per user – and puts the monthly fee way out of proportion.
Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb:
noybEU 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.
Back at the end of October, Facebook (or I should say Meta, since this applies to multiple products) introduced an advertising-free subscription for EU users at the whopping monthly price of €9.99. It was obvious from the start that this limited choice between consenting to tracking and ‘privacy as a luxury’ does not comply with the principles of GDPR, so it’s good to see this move immediately challenged – the European Consumer Organisation has filed a complaint as well, calling out Meta’s practice as amounting to charging for privacy.
Max Schrems:
Fundamental rights are usually available to everyone. How many people would still exercise their right to vote if they had to pay € 250 to do so? There were times when fundamental rights were reserved for the rich. It seems Meta wants to take us back for more than a hundred years.
The more you think about it, the more Facebook’s behavior looks more blatant. For one, there’s no guarantee that by paying the ad-free subscription the company will stop collecting data on your activities on the platform and elsewhere, so people end up paying for the illusion of privacy. Moreover, the majority of Facebook’s content, be it in the main app, Instagram, or more recently Threads, is user-generated, so the company avoids the high media expenditures that may justify subscriptions for television and music. Thirdly, Facebook is charging creators fees to promote their posts because it controls the opaque and ever-shifting ranking algorithm in their feeds, a common complaint of influencers. At every point Facebook is collecting money and data on its users, and then turns around and demands even more to pretend to comply with privacy regulations! Launching a subscription is simply another way for Meta to create revenue streams and present them to investors to boost their share price, with privacy as cover.
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