[neontomo]

Context from the Norwegian article:

Meta promised to ask users whether they want to opt-in, but they never did, so now they are banning these behaviours until they have come up with a better way of handling this.

Furthermore, Meta wanted those who opt-out of data sharing to have to pay money, which is most likely not legal.

[xp84]

> Meta wanted those who opt-out of data sharing to have to pay money, which is most likely not legal.

I really don't get this attitude. I 100% endorse everyone's right to uninstall every Meta app and never use them, and to block their on-page trackers on third-party websites with an adblocker, all that. But the notion that there should be some sort of EU-protected "Right To Use Facebook For Free"... nah. Using the apps inherently shares data with the company whose servers you're using. Don't like it, that's fine, there's only one correct recourse: Don't use it.

Also, if Facebook's users were all paying for it (and all its competitors), there would be no advertising on it, and incentives in social media would be aligned much better. The government which requires companies to provide their service "for free" would be actively working against that better world by pushing the ad-supported model, which they clearly hate, as the only one.

[stubish]

What you are asking for is the ability to sell your right to privacy. Laws generally don't allow you to sell or otherwise relinquish your rights, eg. selling your vote or selling yourself into slavery or accepting licenses in conflict with rights granted by local consumer laws. Some things we don't want assigned a value that can be traded. The EU has decided that the right to privacy includes not being tracked on the Internet, and any 'you can only use this if you give up your right or pay money' is not going to be allowed, because it ends up destroying that right for many.

[bluelu]

It's a double standart again.

Newspapers lobbied the EU that it s allowed for them (not sure if it was changed at the end). But if you go to a large european newspaper site (eg spiegel.de) then it explicitely asks you tha you pay to access it or you must agree to behavioral advertising. But facebook should not be allowed to do this.

[klabb3]

Yes and this should be pointed out. However, it’s imo far from a simple selfish lobbying move. If behavioral advertising and tracking is not allowed by anyone, it will even the playing field as ads return to being context-centric, as it should. It’s too early to say if news papers will try to weasel out an exception for themselves in such a world, imo.

More generally, you can want a change for everyone even if you are not currently doing what you’re preaching. You can play a game according to the rules and want to change the rules at the same time. While I agree this is a lower level of belief you can still want it, and argue for it, in good faith. Deviating from laws and even industry norms can be disproportionately costly, relative to your competitors, especially if you’re already struggling, which is true for most of legacy media.

Also, journalists are typically not the owners of media companies, and they sometimes cover issues with conflicts of interest with their owners. That’s a healthy thing.

[bluelu]

Newspapers weaseled already an exeption out 2 years ago, see https://www.heise.de/news/E-Privacy-Verordnung-EU-Rat-fuer-V...

[einarfd]

I've never seen anything like that in any Norwegian newspaper, and I would expect some of them to try if they thought they could get away with it. But I don't think they would at least not if the retoric coming out of Datatilsynet is anything to go by.

How German newspaper get away with that I have no idea. But you can't expect the Norwegian government to handle German language newspapers. If spiegel.de had a Norwegian presence though. Then it would be reasonable for Norway to have a look at it.

[seabass-labrax]

I loath Spiegel just as much as any other online privacy advocate, but I'd always assumed they were simply in violation of the GDPR. Can you provide any references indicating that this is the result of a special exemption due to successful lobbying?

[bluelu]

There is a german artcile about this here:

https://www.heise.de/news/E-Privacy-Verordnung-EU-Rat-fuer-V...

Read the part about cookie walls for newspapers:

Cookie-Wall soll bleiben

Wer auf seiner Webseite unentgeltlich Nachrichteninhalte verfügbar macht und das durch Werbung finanziert, soll dabei Cookies ohne Zustimmung der Nutzer setzen können. Eine "Cookie-Wall" als Alternative zu einer Bezahlschranke soll also zulässig bleiben. User, die nicht für Werbezwecke analysiert werden möchten, müssen gegebenenfalls ein kostenpflichtiges Abo abschließen. Diese Klausel wird an die Voraussetzung geknüpft, dass der User prinzipiell zwischen verschiedenen Varianten wählen können. Dazu kommen weite Spielräume für Direktmarketing auch via Bots.

[seabass-labrax]

Thank you. If I understand that article correctly, the European Council is proposing a carve-out in the GDPR for newspapers. That would make actions of Spiegel illegal at this moment and until the European Council's proposed exemption is implemented, as well as being illegal in Britain, where the GDPR was implemented originally but further European Union legislation is not automatically followed. Does that sound right to you?

[soco]

Many German sites do that too - nothing that I use daily to remember names, but I see that choice between ads and pay rather often. And I usually choose to leave, but not always...

[ralusek]

That’s like saying that using a site with moderation rules is asking you to sell your right to free speech, or that going to a nude spa is asking you to sell your right to privacy.

I have no problem with EU regulating what Facebook can do, in the same way I accept that some places might regulate against nude spas, I just take issue with the way you framed it.

[anilakar]

Please dont bring free speech into this. As everyone very well knows, it trumps everything else including basic human rights in a certain country.

[DangitBobby]

It is a basic human right.

[stubish]

Going to a nude spa necessitates giving up some right to privacy. You expect the minimum necessary to provide the service you want. But you certainly don't want them filming you and posting the pics on the Internet. This is similar to how the GDPR is fine with storing personal information required to provide the service to the customer, but not storing unnecessary information or using it for other purposes. Going to a nudist bar would be a choice that necessitates giving up some right to privacy, but giving free drinks to women would be coercion and probably illegal in many courts.

Free speech is always in conflict with other rights. You don't get to say whatever you want on a forum someone provided and deemed to be child friendly for example. Or rant about atheism and corruption of the clergy on a bible studies forum. Or commit fraud. This sort of problem is why free speech is not considered a right in many countries and instead a luxury. You get to say what you like but have to suffer the consequences. But your right to free speech stops at my right to not hear you. And your right to pay your employees what you want stops at their right to fair pay. The conflicts and the grey areas need mediation and government regulation.

[ralusek]

> Free speech is always in conflict with other rights

Within the liberal framework, most strongly embodied by the US, rights are fundamentally meant to be negative rights. In other words, they are better conceived of as limitations placed on the state. Freedom of speech means the state cannot dictate what you can or cannot say. The right to privacy means the state is limited in its capacity to rummage through your mail, enter your house, etc.

Europeans tend to view what Americans view as privileges as rights. Positive rights.

> Free speech is always in conflict with other rights. You don't get to say whatever you want on a forum someone provided and deemed to be child friendly for example. Or rant about atheism and corruption of the clergy on a bible studies forum.

That isn't what freedom of speech is as it's conceived in the liberal framework. In the US, there is no law preventing any of those platforms from regulating speech within their own domains. The right simply ensures that the state is itself incapable of regulating speech.

> Going to a nude spa necessitates giving up some right to privacy. You expect the minimum necessary to provide the service you want.

You could argue that no spa necessitates nudity whatsoever. It isn't simple to define the boundaries of what is minimally necessary in order to provide a service. Imagine that you're watching a streaming service which plays ads. If the streaming service collects some information related to your demographic, watching habits, etc, and is able to serve you targeted ads that pay 5x more than if they were anonymous/general ads, many consumers would happy accept that if it meant that they had to watch only half as many ads.

You act as if there is just a relatively straightforward right to privacy, but what's really happening is that the state would be putting (somewhat arbitrary) limitations on the boundaries of what two parties are allowed to consent to (in this case, between the viewer and the streaming company).

American morality tends to favor limitations on the state rather than limitations on the way two consenting parties may engage with one another.

[pests]

But as you say, they aren't asking you to give up your rights (because of the 'or pay money' clause). You can just stop using it. If you want to use it and not give up rights, pay money. What is wrong with that?

[piaste]

The "or you can give up your rights in exchange for a discount" part is the problem. You can't buy a car by agreeing to be a slave for 90 days either.

Commercial subscription services that don't violate your privacy are 100% fine, and incidentally, as xp84 noted, are way healthier because the user is at least a customer. (I dream of a day where companies spend $0 on advertising and instead all commercial websites and social media are run on small subscriptions or frictionless micropayments and the only person they need to keep happy is the customer.)

Of course "free" services have a massive advantage over paid ones. If Meta can profitably run Facebook just on generic ads without tracking, like a newspaper, that's allowed too. But if they can't, well, tough shit.

[pests]

> You can't buy a car by agreeing to be a slave for 90 days either.

Sorta??? It's not like I volunteer my time to my job.

[tagyro]

I don't agree - you can't just stop using it. Given the size of facebook (or google, amazon, microsoft, apple etc), they are ingrained in our (tech) life in such a way that one has to invest a - not negligible - amount of work to stop using them. To sum it up: companies want to have "power", but without having "responsibility".

[dadadatamen]

You can. It's almost quite literally an effort of 30 - 60 min per day or week or month, depending on how skilled you are at keeping things convenient, meaning self-hosting services and maintaining them.

[tempaccount1234]

You can, but if you decide to stay away from messengers like WhatsApp, you miss out. Which is OK unless you have kids in school age.

Once a service gets so big, that you are practically forced to join, regulation seems like a very good idea

[theonlybutlet]

And say getting a job, when everything is through LinkedIn?

[pests]

What? They are not a neccessity. You are speaking like technology is food and water.

I have family my age and older who don't never use Facebook and barely interact with technology and they get by life just fine.

[graphe]

You CAN stop using them. Do you WANT to? Are you unable to?

Social media addiction isn't a right, and just because you have a share to Facebook or Twitter integration doesn't mean you have to use either.

[interactivecode]

Thats like saying, if you don’t like lead in your paint. You can just use different paint. Like yeah sure, but still some regulations that stop them from putting lead in paint is a good thing

[disiplus]

It does not work like that, the country made some laws. For example what safety rules does the car have to follow to be legal in us. You cannot just say, if you don't like that the car does not have a backup camera doesn't use it.

[stubish]

In the case of the right of privacy, what is wrong with your suggestion is that it is what we have today, and we end up where we are today. You must sacrifice your right of privacy to use Facebook, Twitter and others. And using Facebook, Twitter and others is not a choice for many people. It is forced on many (most?) by rules of employment (some schools require teachers to be on Facebook for example), economic reasons (must be on social media to be economically competitive), or just social (all my friends are there, so I need to be there too). Choosing to retain your right of privacy is a sacrifice, which is to say that maintaining your right of privacy has a cost. The EU has said that there should not be a cost to preserving what it sees as a right. Not everyone can afford to pay that cost.

[anilakar]

>> Laws generally don't allow you to sell or otherwise relinquish your rights,

> If you want to use it and not give up rights, pay money.

Ahh, we are not asking you to sell. We are asking you to give them in exchange for services.

[A_non_e-moose]

> >> Laws generally don't allow you to sell or otherwise relinquish your rights,

> Ahh, we are not asking you to sell. We are asking you to give them in exchange for services.

That's covered in the "or otherwise relinquish your rights" part. Privacy is a right, you can't sell or relinquish it, in exchange or donated, doesn't matter.

[lopis]

I often see this argument that if we'd all pay for services like Facebook, they wouldn't have to charge.

Let me offer a counterpoint: if there is money on the table, corporations will get it. Example, you pay for cable, and still get ads. You pay for Netflix and still get Netflix ads in the app. All paid aps harvest and sell your behaviour data. Greed does not permit that money be left on the table.

[hackideiomat]

There are companies that try to align their incentives with the customers incentives by using a certain business model. I pay $25 for a search engine, that costs way less than operating netflix. I would be very shocked if they actually abuse the data they shouldn't collect on me. My point being, this only applies to very big coorps. There are companies that (at least claim to) care about privacy and do not sell off their users.

[lopis]

Well of course. If they sell you a specific product and then don't deliver, then there wasn't money on the table, that's just lying.

[littlestymaar]

> Also, if Facebook's users were all paying for it (and all its competitors), there would be no advertising on it,

Ah yes, much like how cable TV has no ads on it, right? Or newspapers. Or how Microsoft Windows has no ads on it because you paid for the OS? Or like how smart TVs aren't spying on you because you bought them…

If there's money to be made by spying and putting ads, it will be done, no matter if you pay for it or not.

And that's the reason why it is probably illegal: if you accept the cookies, they track you, if you refuse cookies and pay, you have to agree to their terms and conditions which allow them to track you as well. Head they win, tail you lose.

[ako]

With cable you’re paying the cable company, not the content provides. For that you’d have to pay the stations as well. Similar to Netflix, pay for your network, and pay the content provider.

[Terretta]

> With cable you’re paying the cable company, not the content providers.

Cable and satellite such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable or DirecTV pay networks like ESPN and TNT a certain amount PER CUSTOMER for programming content each month. The median price paid for each channel a subscriber gets is 14 cents. Sports content costs the cable company the most, ESPN was estimated to cost $8.37 per month in 2018, but arguably actually should cost much more if you consider time each channel is watched versus its cost:

https://www.thewrap.com/cable-network-carriage-fees/

https://variety.com/vip/pay-tv-true-cost-free-1234810682/

[littlestymaar]

That's exactly the kind of BS Facebook would say to defend their ads for paying customers as well: “you're paying for the portal, not for the feed, the ads pay for the feed” or something like that.

In fact, I'm pretty sure Google will eventually do this for premium after some time: “you're paying the platform, ads are paying the content creators ”.

[Youden]

Facebook is only banned from behavioural advertising; regular advertising is still perfectly fine. They're not being banned from making money at all, they're only being banned from using personal data to make more money.

[dadadatamen]

Nobody will blow the whistle on whether that's true or not. It's a fact that we can't trust companies like Meta. Not because it's engineers who implement dark patterns or because all the people in a business earn more money if they disregard human or environmental wellbeing but because leadership literally lies to congress, judges, the public, their users and their customers all the freaking time.

[A_non_e-moose]

> leadership literally lies to congress, judges, the public, their users and their customers all the freaking time.

The judiciary system takes lies into account. Doing that while testifying under oath might end poorly. See SBF's trial for reference.

[dadadatamen]

And that's great! Similar schemes are still rollin', though, and there are people right here on HN, who could blow the whistle on a great many things that are unethical and corrupt.

[neontomo]

Well, they are already pushing ads on people and make money through that business model. Forcing the ads to be targeted creates another revenue stream for Meta but does not add anything to your argument that we should be willing to give this away in exchange for free use. We are already paying for it, with time and attention and them manipulating our emotions.

I don't mind this business model as much as some, but I think you're arguing the wrong thing here.

[butlerm]

I would love to believe that advertising would go away if only we all paid subscription fees. Cable television tells a different story.

[fragmede]

Then again, Netflix and YouTube Premium contradict that (for now).

[manuelmoreale]

Both are either introducing or toying with the idea of introducing ads. Because paid + ads still makes them more money than just a regular subscription.

And since the goal is to make always more money the future is gonna be paid subs + ads.

[skydhash]

I don’t really think this is gonna fly. It’s quite jarring having ads before or during a movie (even at cinemas, but at least it’s once in a while). With cable you could switch channels, but streaming is a more personal experience. Especially when you’re supposed to have control over the programming.

[WaxProlix]

Cable also contradicted that for a time.

[alkonaut]

> Using the apps inherently shares data with the company whose servers you're using.

That's not a problem. The problem is that these companies share it with others. That's what requires consent and Meta isn't asking for it and does it anyway.

Facebook can show as many ads it wants. It can even show as many ads as it wants without asking for user consent.

[jdietrich]

The GDPR says that consent must be freely given and freely revocable, otherwise it isn't real consent. It would be obviously unfair if, for example, your employer could say "agree to install our spyware on your personal devices or you're fired", or for your landlord to say "agree to let me put surveillance cameras in your apartment or you're evicted". That isn't consent, it's coercion. A right that you can be coerced to relinquish isn't a right.

Facebook have a right to charge a subscription fee. They have a right to ask you to provide your personal data. They don't have the right to charge their users a privacy tax.

[hulitu]

> Using the apps inherently shares data with the company whose servers you're using. Don't like it, that's fine, there's only one correct recourse: Don't use it.

You are missing the part where the user does not know that his data (everything he does) is collected and sold on the open market. Just read a privacy policy. Nowhere is written: we will record everything that you send and your behaviour and sell it. They say they might collect some usage data and what you post and might share it to "third parties".

I would _love_ if i have to pay for this crap. But hey, i already paid for Android and Google is taking my data without any shame, so i'm skeptical that this will bring an improvement.

[zelphirkalt]

Where can I opt-out of being tracked by them without ever having a facebook/meta account?