If you, like me, live in the EU, Facebook is now entirely clamping down and forcing free users to make their personal data available for monetization.
Attempting to access any Facebook domain and perhaps also other meta products will redirect you to the following prompt with a choice between either accepting the monetization of your user data, or coughing up a region-dependent monthly subscription fee: base (for me ~10€) + an additional fee (~7€) for each additional facebook or instagram account you have.
Now, the hidden third option. At an initial glance, it seems like there is no other option but to click one of the buttons - however, certain links still work, and grant access to important pieces of functionality through your web browser.
If anyone has information to add regarding Facebook or Instagram, please do share it. I’ve only (begrudgingly) used the former up until now, but I know many others use Instagram and don’t feel like giving a single cent (nor their personal info) to Meta.
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https://www.facebook.com/dyi - perhaps most important of all, now is a good time to make a request to download your Facebook data. Don’t forget to switch to data for “all time” and “high quality” if you intend to permanently delete your account.
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https://www.facebook.com/your_information - here you can find and manage your information, but crucially also access Facebook messenger.
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The messenger app: Still hasn’t prompted me with anything, though I expect that will change in the not too far future.
Currently my plan is to use messenger to inform any important friends that I intend to leave FB, and where they’ll be able to reach me in the future.
That assumes that because they’re paying they aren’t also tracking. They might not use it for ads directly but they’ll still sell it to others that will show you ads off Facebook.
Facebook’s data is way more valuable to Facebook; it doesn’t sell data to third parties. If you think they’re going to sell the non-monetisable data to third parties, you have to believe they’re willing to introduce this (which is likely to be unpopular) in apparent compliance with data protection laws, while still flagrantly violating them in secret, without any of their many employees nor any of their partners’ employees blowing the whistle (and Meta as a company leaks all the time). If they were doing that, why would they bother setting up the fake “pay to not be tracked” flow, when they could pretend to honour people’s free requests not to be tracked?
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That information is not Personally Identifiable Information and so it’s out of scope of privacy protecting law like the GDPR and is probably not what anyone should be worrying about when it comes to data companies.
For those not familiar with the terminology, this means that an advertiser may receive information like, “there exists a person who is 25-30 years old, likes animals, is politically left wing, lives in Michigan” etc - they don’t get that person’s name or other details that allows the advertiser to go away and advertise to you separately. Nor does it allow the government to find out that you like animals by grabbing the traffic.
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Thanks for this detail - I didn’t know it included IP address and accurate Lat/Long (though I guess only if you enable location services)
I agree that that would be very de-anonymisable and probably does fall under the remit of GDPR etc.
In the present context, I think whether or not Meta is using such granular data for real time bidding currently, they’d be arguing that all the RTB data is sufficiently covered by their privacy policy. But this new dialog says “your data won’t be used for ads” which categorically rules out this possibility. I don’t doubt that Meta could be breaking the law where they have a legal argument they can use to claim they aren’t - what I do doubt is that they are breaking the law when all it would take is a single leak to demonstrate that they are lying in their privacy policy. 4% of global revenue is not to be trifled with!
They didn’t. That was not an option.