Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don’t agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram::Meta is considering offering ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram for $14 a month – but only in Europe.
I hope that also includes WhatsApp. Europeans are addicted to that shit.
And so is the rest is the rest of the world, especially India and South America, afaik. God, I wish we could get rid of it once and for all.
Tell Apple to get rid of their BS iMessage policys then. Apple are the reason iMessage doesn’t work on Android, not Google.
I’m addicted to Viber, not Whatsapp
What is the appeal of viber? it has ads and micro transactions. A lot of people use it, but it is my least favorite.
I’m not addicted. I hate it. It’s a horrible chat app. I especially hate the lack of threads (or at least pinned posts) in groups, I have to scroll through pages of garbage to see that important announcement. I also hate that it’s linked to my phone. If I want to use it on my computer, because I hate typing on phones, it needs my phone to be always connected.
I’m stuck with it because everyone else is using it.
You mean you keep using this thing despite hating it? Now I’ve known a few addicts in my time and that is pretty much the definition…
I know quite a few oxygen addicts then…
Jokes aside, saying that WhatsApp is an addiction is like saying that Americans are addicted to SMS, Imessage or whatever they use down there
Shit? It works across all platforms, in all countries, unrestricted and unpaid, and thus far, adfree. That’s pretty great, if you ask me.
Key words: “thus far”
Facebook wouldn’t have acquired it if they didn’t have plans to squeeze the living soul out of it. In due time. Their hope is that by then, all alternatives will be wiped out, and with it being so integrated as a daily driver, we’ll be paying a subscription, with no E2EE, sharing metadata (which btw is sometimes more valuable than the content of your messages) unwillingly.
What’s funny/crazy too is that all the top execs (including Zuck himself) use Signal. That’s the irony of the digital world we live in: the closer you are to these technologies, the more you learn, and the less subjected to it you actually wanna be.
Do you have a source for what tools they use?
Zuck uses Signal: https://mashable.com/article/zuckerberg-on-signal
Linda Yaccarino uses Signal (but not Twitter 🤣): https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/28/x-ceo-iphone-home-screen-x-isnt-there/
Other names are blanking right now off the top, but in The Social Dilemma, the engineers and ex-execs talk about not allowing their family members (especially kids) to be on the platforms they themselves built. I specifically remember an Instagram engineer (Bailey?) and a VP/president of Pinterest.
Its pretty good deal until you consider what facebook gets out of it. Privately owning the primary source of communication that a large chunk of the world uses because its free and convenient will surely have no repercussions to end users later down the line once they end the ‘grow service as quickly as possible at cost’ phase and enter the ‘lets squeeze our users for every penny we can to get back profit and because we know they ll take it since our service is too convenient to give up’ phase.
Oh who am I kidding like anyone who uses whatsapp or any meta owned service cares about things like privacy as long as they get their free communication they are happy as peaches and will take any amount of corpo dicking
Not everyone who cares about privacy is also into not being able to contact anyone anymore because all everyone around them uses is Whatsapp
It’s end to end encrypted, so they don’t get to see any of my communication. They know who I’m talking to through my metadata, and can probably estimate where in the world I am, but that’s about it.
Sure, Signal would be better, but people are notoriously hard to adapt, so that’s wishful thinking at best.
And who manages the encryption keys you think?
My phone. Because that’s how end-to-end encryption works.
“today we are announcing that anyone who would like to continue end to end encryption will need to pay an extra 30$ per month” Also im not sure how much I would trust e2e on any meta software there may very well be backdoors that let them get the clear text from either end.
Definitely agree that people are hard to change, especially once they get used to a service they like that is extremely popular. Its a human nature problem, and those don’t have easy solutions. Who knows maybe meta/facebook will screw up sooo badly one day that even the most diehard fan will jump ship but I don’t see that happening. Corpos know just how to push things as far as they can without getting too burned.
WhatsApp can read your messages.
And the metadata’s not encrypted.
Unfortunately, too many hear “encrypted” and assume it’s automatically secure or private no matter what.
Facebook told Gizmodo that WhatsApp can read messages because they’re considered a version of direct messaging between the company and the reporter. They added that users who report content make the conscious choice to share information with Facebook; by their logic, Facebook’s collection of that material doesn’t conflict with end-to-end encryption.
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.
So there’s a metric called “ARPU” for social media, average revenue per user.
Facebook’s monthly ARPU for America+Europe is $30 (Reddit’s is .49, lol)
This is actually a pretty fair price for the service. And should be a legal requirement as an option tied to ARPU.
Who is calculating and publishing that metric based on what data?
It’s usually just revenue divided by total users, both typically public information.
Honestly I’d pay 5 euros for instagram without ads. Just because it’s a popular channel for friends and artists I follow and the ads in the timeline are making the whole experience so difficult.
14 is a lot though unless you work with these platforms.
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.
Would this plan remove all ads? Only then I’d consider it.
Maybe enshittification is actually a good thing. Hear me out: the worse things get, the more motivated people are to ask questions, migrate to alternatives, build better platforms, and hopefully 1) enact well-informed legislation, and 2) prevent what appears to be this “necessity” of enshittification from continuing to happen in an endless cycle.
I love your optimism…
Sometimes you gotta (knowingly) be a little crazy, a little delusional, juuust enough to keep going… otherwise, if it feels like a lost cause, then there’s no motivation.
As I got older, I was like damn… Some people work so hard to make things worse, I gotta work at least as hard to combat it lol
That’s the basis for the theory behind the business life cycle. The theory goes that eventually companies mature and settle into a kind of coasting phase, where they maximise profit instead of continuing to innovate. This provides a large opening for competition, who inevitable eat the incumbent’s lunch.
Indeed, on a long enough time scale, all companies eventually die. It’s just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated. I’m sure people thought that of the Dutch East India company at the time, yet it dissolved 224 years ago.
Eventually, Facebook will kill itself. It’s already done such a great job.
That’s true, but it also took 200 years for it to die. 200 years is “forever” for all those people who were born and died while it existed. Even if we assume that people waited to the ripe old age of 25 to have kids That means that there could have been 7 generations of a given family that were born and died while it existed.
It’s just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated
It’s also that the U.S. has shown repeatedly that it’ll prop up companies with ongoing subsidies, or even bail them out as in the 2008 crisis.
I have to concur with the concern. It’s not a free market if we don’t let bad businesses fail. What’s that saying? Privatised profits and socialised losses? Less of that please.
The problem is their ability to gobble up new companies that could threaten them and use any innovative patients they may hold to either enrich themselves or stifle competition or both.
That is the premise used to argue that one day a zombie company will emerge which will live forever. In millennia, it has never happened. I’m fairly confident it’s unlikely. These companies eventually allow their culture and focus to settle into complacency. Buying other companies can’t solve that. In fact, it hastens their demise, as they spend large sums of money on companies they’re incapable of properly utilising.
I have a family member working at FB and they said by the end of this year they will have closed down allllll the fancy new office buildings they built in the last decade or so, and revert operations to just the main, original campus. So seems like they’re on the down-and-down for sure.
My current employer went from rigid 100% office attendance, a là Office Space and cubes and dress codes and Nina, to 0%, overnight, for COVID. They sold most of the space but for 2 permanent and 4 more hotel spots, they have meeting spaces and a revolving receiver assignment for packages, but the entirety of the staff is effectively remote since the state of emergency was declared. Transition was fast and furious and they survived with most of their sanity intact. They wrote remote-first into the union contract, and quietly mention it’s from anywhere in the country.
Reduction in space doesn’t mean reduction in staff nor mandate. We’re only growing.
Just, look for other indicators.
But I was supposed to be the product!
Now you can choose who is the product. All hail the free market!
I would love for everyone to have a legit and easy to understand reason to fuck off from Meta. Also make Whatsapp cost something per message! Twitter should try it too.
WhatsApp pre-Facebook acquisition was phenomenal. Had close to half a billion users paying $1-$3 per year. I think the team was no more than 15 and profitable.
It was actually private and secure, and obviously sharing no metadata with Facebook as it does today.
Oh, what coulda been. Gotta build and support Signal now. (WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton is executive chairman of Signal now.)
I have used it since 2010, never paid a penny. Moving friends and relatives to Signal has been a waste of time, I feel like I have the first fax machine in the world.
WhatsApp used to be a yearly paid app. Even though they rarely actually “collected”.
I wish it still was and Meta never got their grubby hands on it.
I was one of the suckers that actually paid for Whatsapp back in 2014. Back then it was just a way to support the devs. They’ll never be able to charge for Whatsapp, with all these different free options like Telegram.
You’re not sucker. Just a great guy.
I found a great little web thing in like '01: you put it in your mp3 directory and it launches a playlist when you hit it with your browser. It was tiny, elegant, reliable and clean. I paid the guy. Maybe I was the only one.
I paid him again when I used it somewhere else.
I lost it in a machine collapse, and my mp3s were merely generated data and not valuable. So I needed it again. I paid the guy again. He writes back and says “you’re like half my total income on this. It’s good. Never pay again, but if you come to the city we should grab a beer.”.
He was a great guy. Never got to NYC after that though, just bad luck and an airplane crash, but I looked forward to it.
14$ per month looks pretty expensive.
Ublock Origin is free.
The ads are not the main problem, the main problem is how the “personal ads” are chosen by harvesting and sharing all your private data.
A tracker blocker is a more suitable solution along with the ad blocker.
uBlock blocks most trackers already. Also using Fingerprinting protection via another extension or if you’re on Firefox on its settings, they probably won’t get much data on you with ads.
correct, actually both together. dns blocking both trackers and ads will result in your profile never being harvested. It will still be there with limited info, whatever they have gathered from facebook scrolling, likes, chat and comments, but it will not be queried in order to show you ads.
Privacy Badger does a good job blocking Facebook trackers.
That’s the point. It’s grossly overpriced because they don’t want people to get it, but they need to offer it to comply with EU rules.
Basically extorting the users.
On the long run, the data you generaty by ads is probably even more valuable.
Do they really think their service is worth 12-15 bucks a month?
No
I’d maybe be willing to pay $12-15 per annum for no user tracking. But that price per month is a joke. They just want to deter people from paying by offering an inflated price, so they can turn around in a few months and argue there is no demand for it.
Facebook obviously makes more the 12 to 15 dollars per year per user on ads.
I think the goal is to say they offer both an ad free and ad supported experience. The user then can choose which they want. This may skirt some grey areas in the law since it really puts the burden on the user to choose.
No, it’s a punitive fee.
If you need to use facebook for whatever reason, but refuse to opt in to targeted ads, we will punish you with this fee.
Yup, it’s just a way to force people to give up this right.
I wish them the best of luck with this tactic. (not)
All that’s going to do is incentivize a federated alternative.
Lol. Do that.
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.
It probably will.
No service should be forced to give their service for free, or be forced to offer it via ads. Facebook at any moment could say the service costs $100 a month to use, we don’t care what you think or say.
The big question (which is disputed, even among DPAs) is whether offering this makes it OK to offer it via ads with tracking without a way to opt out for free.
Doing “tracking ads or no service” is illegal - the consent isn’t “freely given” and thus invalid, so they’d be processing data without consent or other valid justification. Some argue that with such a model the consent is freely given…
Either way, the max fine will be 4% of revenue, which means nothing if doing it this way doubles revenue…
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?
Now that’s something I could get behind… €2,352 would be pretty nice lol
