Say one decides to pay…what guarantees do I get that my data won’t be used or that I won’t get targeted?
False advertising laws?
Good luck proving that your data came from meta sources after you paid.
Trust me bro
This is great!
I wonder how many € I can rent an EU citizenship for ;-)
It’s not about EU citizenship but if you are actually living in the EU.
You guys might have a point… I was thinking they would impose some kind of draconian verification as the next impediment to compliance.
Also kinda thinking about those weird “travel agencies” that let you rent a return flight so you can get your visa approved.
But if it really is anyone on EU soil they truly may be out of options.
My VPN says I do
If there is still one option, is not it still an option? It is out of choices, but not out of options, right?
Plural, more than one. They are out of options.
Now there’s the clarification everyone needs.
Max Schrems, the Austrian activist lawyer whose 13-year legal crusade against Meta is what gradually removed those options
I wonder, does anyone know how would one go about acomplishing something like this? One of major websites here in Czech, and a major search engine, has started doing exactly the same thing - pay or agree. And I really don’t like that. Are there organizations you can contact, or do you have to have the resources to just sue them?
You should search for something like “data protection office” in Czech language, they likely have tips on how to lodge a complaint.
edit: should be a good website: https://uoou.gov.cz/en/consultation/contact
It looks like Meta’s strategy of charging European Facebook and Instagram users, for the privilege of not being tracked for ad-targeting purposes, ain’t gonna fly.
I’m in the US and also don’t care about Facebook and Instagram, but if I could pay a privacy fee to Alphabet and not be logged and data-mined, I’d do that.
I don’t know if there’s enough people who would for that to be a viable market, but I’d be there.
Well yeah but you guys are already used to paying data collection agencies for protection just so you can have some basic quality of privacy (like not getting sales calls or having your identity stolen).
I imagine that paying a tech giant for it is just the logical next step.
If Apple came out with a paid service that said “I’ll make sure those other companies don’t have your data” it would sell like hotcakes and nobody would think twice about the irony.
I mean, it’s a service. You can pay for it with your money, or pay with your data. I’d prefer the former, myself. But either way, it’s not going to be free.
By this same logic I take it you’d be ok with the day care saying “you can pay with your money or we can use your kid for manual labor”?
I would prefer paying for it with my taxes. Not for facebook though.
Like, you want Instagram to get some kind of government subsidy? Why? And what about people who don’t want to use it? I mean, I don’t use Instagram.
I would imagine it as lemmy. It would be a free, ethical software which is indirectly funded by the government. Everybody uses facebook so that’s a good reason to turn it into a public property. We could make it without anti-features. Made for people, not for profit.
It’s not about privacy if you’re paying. Privacy can’t be negotiated. This is a hard fact. It’s privacy or nothing.
if I could pay a privacy fee to Alphabet and not be logged and data-mined, I’d do that.
It’s called Google Workspace and it’s decently nice. You can get a basic business starter account for something like ~$7 per month/per user + whatever you want to pay to register a domain each year. Takes a little bit of know how and you need to do some lifting for yourself that Google would otherwise shoulder for you, but it’s pretty nice and has more benefits beyond just the privacy implications, like 30GB of account storage and Google Meet conferencing for up to 100 people without time limits. On the downside, some stuff that needs to track your usage to function properly (Like YouTube video recommendations) just do not work with a Workspace account because they don’t track your preferences so they don’t have a way to build a recommendation profile for you.
I’ve been doing it for years now and I appreciate it a lot. In the rare instances when I need to go do something on my old Gmail account it’s shocking every time how bad the unpaid versions of Google products have gotten.
Hmm. That sounds interesting.
goes to investigate
It sounds like that covers Gmail and stuff like that, but at least in this 2022 article, it doesn’t sound like it covers Web searches on Google, or YouTube, or Google Maps. That sounds like it’s fair game for data-mining.
Regarding the promise to not use data from “Workspace core services,” Google’s statement doesn’t cover Google Search (it’s not a core Workspace app), which is the primary vector for Google ads and data for Google ads. That’s right—the “Search History” setting from Google doesn’t cover Google Search history.
Google’s reasoning for this change is that, because Workspace apps are paid for, “Google never uses your data in Google Workspace core services for advertising,” the company said. So basically the new “Search History” setting could be called “save data that won’t be used for ads.”
The terms “Google Workspace products” and “additional Google services” are the key to understanding that description. Basically, Google is splitting the data that was previously captured by “Web & App Activity” into two settings. “Search History” will only cover apps that are part of the “Google Workspace” product lineup. There is a full list of those services here, but it’s basically Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Contacts, Drive, Google Chat, and Keep—the business apps—and not Google Maps, Google Search, YouTube, and other products that lack a strong business use case. So for paying Workspace users, Search History will now cover usage data for Workspace stuff, while Web & App Activity will cover every other Google product that isn’t specifically listed in the Workspace terms.
I actually consider the tracking of my browsing/watching history to be integral to the search experience. It’s why when I search for Python, I get results about the programming language and not snakes both in Search and YouTube. Or why Commodore gets me the computer and not naval crap. Or any number of other things that steer their search results towards things in my interests and away from junk I don’t care about.
An ad blocker in my browser keeps anything else they’re targeting at me through their scraping out of my hair while also blocking a load of what they might learn about me from third party sites, so I’m not terribly bothered what they think they know about me, they’re not getting access to the bulk of the stuff I’d consider personal, and the junk they do track is kept so that they can get me results that will matter to me instead of generic crap.
I think there’s a general misunderstanding that Google tracks stuff so that they can sell it, when the reality is that they keep it so they know where to target ads (that I never see) and so that they can provide results relevant to my interests so I’ll keep coming back to (not) see ads. They don’t sell the info they collect, they sell people the ability to run ads against that info. If they were selling the info itself, they’d be killing the golden goose. So long as they’re contractually not allowed to look at my mail and files, I’m good with the rest of what they take because it 100% goes into making a better experience for me using their services so long as I’m running Firefox/uBlock.
That said, if you don’t want tracking being used to improve your search experience, a Workspace account indeed won’t get you 100% away from it. I tried using DDG for a while and I just couldn’t hang with it. Its lacking the little dossier that Google has on me made it so that I constantly had to work harder to find what I wanted vs a quick search on Google, and that’s what you’d get without the tracking and info collection. It wasn’t worth the tradeoff for me, maybe it is for you though?
I actually consider the tracking of my browsing/watching history to be integral to the search experience.
I don’t have a problem with people who are okay with it getting it. I’m not saying that Google shouldn’t be allowed to do that, just that it’s not what I want.
It wasn’t worth the tradeoff for me, maybe it is for you though?
I use DDG now, as well as some other things like dropping cookies at browser exit. But they aren’t really an alternative to, say, YouTube. And…I mean, I’ve got no problem with Google’s services. I just would prefer to pay for them with money rather than with data.
Fuck that and fuck them.
And who cares about people like me who can’t afford to shell out $50 each month to not be tracked by various services, right?
The service isn’t going to be provided for free – it’s a business, not a charity. One way or another, it gets paid for. You have two options:
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Pay with your data. That’s what happens today. If someone’s okay with that, it remains an option.
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Pay with money. This would be an option to the above.
Personally, while I don’t use or care about Facebook, I’d like to have the option to pay with money rather than data for services that I do use. Some of those don’t have that option today.
I’d also add that this doesn’t just apply to online services. For example, we’ve been talking about car tracking using cell radios to send data back a bit on the Threadiverse. If someone doesn’t care about their car transmitting data back, okay, fine. I’ve got no problem with that being an option available to them, if it can reduce the purchase price and someone is okay with that. But I’d prefer to have the option to just pay a higher purchase price and not have that happen. I don’t really want to screw around with trying to game the system and disabling cell radios and trying to let other customers bear the price of my subsidized car (nor is that really fair to those customers, frankly). I just want to have the option to pay for my car the way I historically did – I give money to the automaker up front, deal is done.
A vendor should be agnostic as to whether someone pays with data or money, as long as they are able to charge enough to cover whatever they lose via not being able to sell data and whatever overhead exists from maintaining two payment models. The only argument I can think of against it is that it requires them to expose some data as to how valuable they assess the data to be. That might be considered a trade secret, but given that the consumer really needs that data to assess whether-or-not they want the company to have that data and that price information is required to be available to the consumer for an efficient market to work, I’m okay with imposing that limitation on the vendor.
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What’s really unhinged is the amount of resources invested into gaslighting Meta does. https://about.fb.com/news/2024/01/investing-in-privacy/
They even have a “Chief Privacy Officer”. They have brainwashed entire departments into believing that Meta actually cares about privacy, it’s so terrifying. I wonder if people working there realize that, or they have simply fell for the gaslighting.
Doesn’t CPO means Chef of marketing and communication, does it?
I wouldn’t doubt that the CPO is trying their hardest to convince people to care but people just dont
Yeah that’s often the problem. They hire people who care and are good at the stuff so they can point to them and say “we really do care as a company” and then they aren’t given the leverage they need inside the company to implement real changes
I wonder if people working there realize that, or they have simply fell for the gaslighting.
Or they’re just like everyone else and are desperate for money to live so they sell their souls.
The more college debt a person has, the more malleable they are.
They probably don’t care as long as they get paid so they can live and survive in this boring dystopia
yeah that wasn’t an excuse then, isnt an excuse now.
morality comes second to survival
and if you do something horrible, you still deserve to swing, because morality (the smart kind at least) doesn’t come from magical Fucking fairy dust, it is survival.
Facebook has caused genocides. a comparison to an as camp guard who’s drunk to within an ounce of blackout for every shift isnt so uunreasonable, and he still deserves to swing, unless he’s helping people escape.
IDK, there are lots of other jobs than at Facebook. They pay really well though.
I have a personal rule to never work at a company I morally disagree with, and it has worked well so far. I don’t like any of the companies I’ve worked for, but they solve real problems and don’t abuse users too much.
okay but is it really surviving if you can’t afford a yacht though? you should be able to purge a few ethnic minorities for a yacht, right? at least if you dont really mean it, about the killing?
“Just following orders” didn’t stick in 1945, it sure as hell doesn’t stick today.
🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺
Is cutting his hair an option? If he needs, I have a device that uses gravity to chop things…
Leaving the EU could be an option.
Dreams are free and can’t be tracked.
Meta seemed to think that was a threat that would get the EU to cave to their demands and the regulators’ response was basically
Chad EU vs virgin meta
To be fair, tech companies can do whatever they want in the EU, No party would ever want to be responsible for WhatsApp, Windows, or ChatGPT not being available anymore.
Are you blind, deaf and dumb, or just living under a rock? The EU has been slapping fine after fine on scummy American companies.
The companies that own those won’t give up the revenue from the EU lmao
Wouldn’t that be a treat!
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
Good news, that’s one point where the EU takes good decisions. Sadly, fight against privacy in terms of anti money laundering rules and similar
