Meta plans to offer paid subscriptions to Europeans to use Instagram and Facebook without advertising and thus comply with European legislation on personal data and targeted advertising, according to a source close to the matter.
According to information first revealed by the Wall Street Journal Tuesday, Meta is working on several formulas.
Subscribers could pay around 10 euros per month for their Instagram or Facebook account on their computer, and 13 euros for mobile applications on smartphones. Each additional account would add around 6 euros to the monthly bill.
Users who do not consent to the American group collecting their personal data for advertising targeting purposes would thus retain access to the platforms, for a fee.
Meta and Google have built their empires – and, in large part, the economic structure of the web – on this model: targeting billions of users with finely targeted and personalized advertisements using the personal data that the 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, then with the Digital Markets Regulation (DMA) , which came into force this summer.
The digital platforms concerned have until March 6, 2024 to comply with these new obligations.
“Free to refuse”
Meta presented this proposal to European regulators in September, according to the same confidential source. Brussels has not reacted officially.
“Meta believes in the value of free services financed by personalized advertising,” a spokesperson for the group told AFP.
“However, we continue to explore opportunities to comply with evolving regulatory requirements. We have nothing else to share at this time,” he added.
Offering paid subscriptions would represent a radical change of approach for the company which had promised that Facebook would “always” be free.
But this business model is now widespread, from X (formerly Twitter) to streaming platforms like Netflix, which are cheaper or free with advertising, and more expensive or paid without advertising and with additional benefits.
Last July, the EU Court of Justice issued a ruling confirming that Meta did not have the right to share personal information about its users between its platforms.
Users “must be free to refuse individually […] to give their consent to specific processing of data which is not necessary for the execution of the contract, without being obliged to completely abstain from using the service,” the Court decided on July 4.
Consequently, these users must “be offered, where appropriate in return for an appropriate fee, an equivalent alternative option not accompanied by such data processing”.