Meta intends to make paid subscriptions available to Europeans so that they can use Instagram and Facebook without advertising and, thus, comply with European legislation on personal data and targeted advertising, a source linked to the process revealed this Tuesday.
According to information revealed for the first time by the Wall Street Journal this Tuesday, Meta is working on several formulas, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Subscribers can pay about 10 euros per month for the Instagram or Facebook account on the computer and 13 euros for the mobile applications on smartphones, while each additional account would add about 6 euros to the monthly bill.
Users who have not given their consent for the North American group to collect their personal data for advertising purposes will maintain access to the platforms, upon payment of a fee.
Meta and Google built their empires, and to a large extent the economic structure of the Internet, based 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 for years against the tracking of Internet users without their consent, first with the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of 2016 and then with the Digital Markets Regulation (DMA), which entered in effect this summer.
Meta has until March 6, 2024 to comply with its new obligations and the Californian company presented this proposal to regulators in September.
Brussels has not officially reacted on the matter.
In July, the EU Court of Justice issued a ruling confirming that Meta did not have the right to share personal information about its users on its platforms.
Users “must be free to individually refuse (…) to give their consent to certain data processing that is not necessary for the performance of the contract, without being obliged to completely refrain from using the service,” the court stated in July .
Consequently, “these users must be offered, where appropriate, upon payment of an appropriate fee, an equivalent alternative option not accompanied by such data processing.”
Source: TSF
