Meta plans to make paid subscriptions available to Europeans so they can use Instagram and Facebook without ads and thus comply with European laws on personal data and targeted advertising, a source linked to the lawsuit revealed on Tuesday.
According to information first revealed by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Meta is working on several formulas, the agency France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Subscribers can pay about 10 euros per month for an Instagram or Facebook account on a computer and 13 euros for mobile applications on smartphones, while each additional account would add about 6 euros to the monthly bill.
Users who did not consent to the North American group collecting their personal data for targeted advertising purposes would therefore continue to have access to the platforms upon payment of a fee.
Meta and Google have built their empires, and to a large extent the economic structure of the Internet, on this model: reaching billions of users with personalized, well-targeted ads, using the personal data that companies collect about them.
But the European Union (EU) has been fighting the tracking of internet users without their consent for years, first with the 2016 European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and then with the Digital Markets Regulation (DMA), which came into effect this summer.
Meta has until March 6, 2024 to meet its new obligations and the Californian company presented this proposal to regulators in September.
Brussels has not yet officially responded to this issue.
In July, the Court of Justice of the EU issued a ruling confirming that Meta did not have the right to share personal information about its users through its platforms.
Users “must have the freedom to individually refuse (…) to give their consent to specific data processing that is not necessary for the performance of the contract, without being obliged to completely refrain from using the service”, according to the court in July.
Accordingly, “these users should be offered, where appropriate, upon payment of an appropriate fee, an equivalent alternative option that does not involve such data processing”.
Source: DN
