This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
First they manipulate their algorithms so that small businesses lose almost all visibility... Except when buying ads.
Now this?
Does that actually mean businesses won't even reach their potential customers with paid ads anymore?
So you give them $14 and hope, they don't sell your data? I never had a facebook/whatsapp account and never will and I know why.
Ad targeting should just be banned outright. It serves noone and creates huge pools of easy to abuse data.
They seem to have copied the approach from multiple European newspapers that consists to disable tracking if you subscribe. And unfortunately most data protection agencies seem okay with that.
It infuriates me that you have to pay for the basic right to not be tracked, given that you already have to be particularly tech-literate to avoid tracking by yourself...
I find it a tough one, because they offer a product/service that costs a fortune to maintain and operate, and if they can't make money from your data then what do they do? Not having your data harvested is just a side-benefit of paying for the thing you use a dozen times per day.
If they couldn't use your data or charge then it would shut down.
You wouldn't run a business at a 100% loss.
I don't understand why people think digital things should all be free.
Not being tracked doesn't mean they can't have ads.
TV ads are still a thing and so are billboard ads.
They could simply show ads depending on the context of the content you're looking at.
You can serve ads without any of the invasive tracking, and you can have paid access without any of the invasive tracking...
I don't think most people actually think digital things should be free, just that they're not invasive data-hoarding piles of crap.
He really wants to sink that ship, doesn't he?
Here I should say that you can always donate money to good services like lemmy, mastodon, peertube or important organizations like FSF, EFF.org(if you are in USA), Linux Foudation, X.org(wayland is part of it too).
Could you EU people turn that around and charge fuckzuck 14 euros for every month you've kept your account, as that's the apparent value of your profile?
Are they going to stop allowing people to edit their own interests too? What's the difference between not allowing personalization, and regularly clearing out their "collection" of your perceived interests?
I am not convinced this gets them off the hook. But I'll assume he has better lawyers than me. What it does show, is the value of forcing people to provide data to provide personalized ads.
No joke that would be great for privacy and putting users first. Users would go the product to the customers and the platform would actually need to cater to them.
The same would happen with Twitter.
Now, social media depends on its massive size, so even if makes the platform more user-centric, it would reduce the amount of users and reduce its value.
I feel like this is short-sighted on Meta's part. Since it sounds like they will still serve paid users non-personalized ads, I think they'd be better off losing a little revenue on those users who actually make the effort to turn off ad personalization. Otherwise they are going to lose users over this which is going to make Facebook just that much less relevant for the people who are willing to use it with personalized ads or pay to ONLY get non-personalized ads.
Part of the reason that their service is popular is that it has huge market share. Every time they shave off a segment of their user base Facebook becomes that much less relevant for everyone.
