If you don’t want your personal information to end up in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and company, be prepared to pay. According to The Wall Street JournalMeta presented his plan to introduce versions of Facebook and Instagram without ads to the European Commission and the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), and revealed How much do you plan to charge for them?.
The aforementioned media indicates that the American company intends to implement this proposal in the coming months. However, it is unknown if it can happen before the end of the year or if it is part of the 2024 strategy.
What is indicated is that, once the subscription goes live, European users – new or existing – will have two options. The first will be access to social networks for free, but with personalized advertising, as is already the case today. The second, pay a monthly fee to have Facebook and Instagram without ads.
Those who lean towards the latter would have to spend a few 10 euros per month to have a Facebook or Instagram account free of ads. It is worth clarifying that this price would apply only to those who subscribe from the desktop web versions. Those who choose to do it from the iOS and Android apps would have to pay a few 13 euros monthly. Joining the paid versions from your mobile would be more expensive due to the commissions from the Apple and Google app stores, of course.
Facebook and Instagram would launch their versions without ads in the coming months
But the story doesn’t end there. To the monthly figure that Facebook or Instagram would charge for an account without ads, they would be added another 6 euros for each additional linked profile. Not much more is explained about it, but the extra sum would impact those who wanted an ad-free experience on the two social networks.
If so, the monthly price for not seeing ads on both Facebook and Instagram would be 16 or 19 euros. As long as they have a single profile on each platform, and depending on what device they subscribed from, of course.
Be careful, just because Meta has shared its idea with European regulators does not necessarily mean that it conforms to what they intend with respect to protecting user privacy. Let’s not forget that Mark Zuckerberg’s people have been punished on multiple occasions for the misuse of the data of millions of people registered on their social networks. This year, in fact, the company received a record fine of 1.2 billion euros for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta’s plan to introduce ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram would not go unchallenged by the DPC and the European Commission. To the authorities They would not be convinced by the prices stipulated by Californians, since they would consider them too high. This could lead users to be inclined to continue with the free and ad-supported versions, even if they do not want to continue handing over their data.
If regulators believe that the paid versions of Meta platforms are not really useful in protecting user privacy, it would not be strange for an investigation to be launched into this matter. We will be attentive to the news.