2023-11-28 18:51:04
It was expected and today it has been confirmed. This Tuesday, the European Center for Digital Rights (noyb, for its acronym in English) has filed a lawsuit against Meta for having activated a subscription plan that forces European users of Facebook e Instagram who do not want to be tracked for advertising purposes to pay a monthly fee of 13 euros or more than 250 euros per year.
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The complaint filed by this Austrian non-profit organization assures that it is a strategy by the American technology giant to “circumvent the laws of privacy” from European Union (EU). In January, the European Data Protection Board fined Meta €390 million and ordered it to obtain users’ consent to profit from their personal information. In July, the EU Court of Justice ruled that the company’s treatment of that data to send advertising personalized was illegal.
The company headed by Mark Zuckerberg then chose to introduce a charging option, which since the beginning of November forces users to choose. Who wants to use a version of Facebook or Instagram without adverts Based on your behavior, you will have to pay 12.99 euros per month, while, starting in March 2024, each additional linked account will cost another 8 euros.
Today we filed our first (yes, more planned) complaint on Meta’s “Pay or Okay” system. Considering that users have on average 35 apps on their phone, you may soon pay € 8.000+ per year to keep your #GDPR rights – let’s see what the @EU_EDPB will say!https://t.co/5GCCy5jPfJ
— Max Schrems ???????? (@maxschrems) November 28, 2023
Forced consent
EU law only considers users’ consent to be valid if it is given “freely.” Noyb denounces that, by conditioning this choice on privacy on an economic cost, Meta “has implemented the exact opposite of a genuinely free choice.” “How many people would continue to exercise their right to vote if they had to pay 250 euros to do so?” asks the lawyer. Max Schrems, driver of the demand, in a statement. “There were times when Fundamental rights They were reserved for the rich. It seems that Meta wants to take us back more than a hundred years.”
The information collected by this organization in defense of digital rights indicates that only between 3% and 10% of users want to transfer their personal data, but that, when faced with a rate, more than 99% choose not to pay. “All available scientific research suggests that ‘Pay or Okay’ systems are the antithesis of free consent and fundamentally affect the free will of users,” they lament.
Finally, the complaint filed this Tuesday with the Austrian Data Protection Authority also points out that the subscription fee proposed by Meta is “disproportionate” and could generate a domino effect in internet that ends up harming citizens. “If Meta gets her way, her competitors will soon follow in her footsteps,” she warns. “Taking into account that a telephone average is 35 Applications installed, maintaining privacy could soon cost around 8,815 euros per year.
Schrems has already warned that this is the first, but not the last, lawsuit that they will file against the media giant. social networks.
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