Electronic highway robbery : your money or your life!

When is consent freely given? Is the recent trend towards forced consent for access or face punitive subscription costs really fair and even legal?

Facebook is the most obvious example, but one of my weather apps is now following the same path. They want to use my info (not always clearly defined in scope or intent), or my agreement to a higher than comfortable monthly subscription, with an obvious pressure to agree to the former.

I don’t object to shotgun advertising (in moderation, not every other post) because I can simply ignore it. If it gets annoying I will block the advertiser, but I understand that some income is necessary to keep the services going. But my personal info, including location, interests and contacts, is just that: personal, not for public consumption. So my initial response is to deny everything and just stop using the service.

What is my value to Meta? Perhaps we should divide the turnover by the number of subscribers:?

2022 annual revenue was 116 billion, made from 3 billion monthly active users (MAU). Daily active users number around 2 billion. But most revenue comes from the US – nearly 50% of the income being generated by less than 10% of the user base. Note that the monthly charge does not apply to US users, being EU limited, maybe 15% of the user base.

Just going with the crude numbers, the 400 million EU user accounts for around 20% of the revenue, say 25 billion. So each user is responsible for just over $60 per annum, that works out to say $5 per month. Ok, that’s higher than I had originally imagined, but still only half of the demand for ad-free access. Again, I remind you that I can accept adverts, but not the use of my personal information, so this is really a double insult.

Facebook cookie consent, give us your personal info or we want a tenner a month for an ad free subscription (and we will probably resell your info anyway)