this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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Privacy

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Meta charges up to €251.88 per year to respect the fundamental right to privacy of EU users. This is a violation of the GDPR.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Are Meta even committing to stop tracking when users pay? Or are they simply not showing targeted ads but still totally tracking?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Well considering if you actively avoid meta products for ethical reasons they still make a ghost profile of you made from photos people upload with you in it and contact lists of people who have you in their phone and allow meta full access to their shit for some reason, “just in case” you ever join Facebook. Fairly sure it’s then used to build a profile of you and your internet use to serve you ads and sell your tracking data. Fuck the modern day internet is just fucking rotten at the core. I’m not sure I answered your question but I think it gives you the gist

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

More notably, what it also does not mean is "we will stop collecting it"...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Exactly. And then selling it to 3rd parties that then use it for ads.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Follow-up question, does paying for Facebook do anything about tracking & ads run by Meta outside of their ecosystem?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I literally cant believe them. And would not pay a cent. Meanwhile I donate all the time to peertube, lemmy, mastodon, etc

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think that, at least for users out of the EU, the only alternative will be to change to the i2p network or to use more extensions and scripts than bookmarks in the browser to avoid this surveillance crap of these data hogs "to make America great again" I only hope that in the future the EU becomes a little more alert in offering enough software and services to be on level eyes of those in the USA. There are very good products in the EU, but most of them little known and marginal, the few that have made a name for themselves are KDE, Proton, Tuta and Vivaldi, little else..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I was into i2p once. Poorly its like nearly not developed it seemy, there still is no install-and-run Browser like Torbrowser. And the lack of exit nodes makes it really impractical

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Well, it's still poorly used, but this can change in the future with logical improvements. Decentralized products are always poor if there are only few which use it, above with shabby servers. But a decentralized network is at the end the only way to escape the control of these surveillance companies. Tor in the Onion network isn't really free of this and controled with backdoors by the NSA and others (the Onion was developed by US Defense and Secrete services), entering only with TOR, without also using VPN with several server redirects (startet before starting TOR, to get the tunnel beginning from the VPN server and not from the one of your ISP. Because of this a VPN extension in the browser isn't a so good idea, only can start after the browser connect to your ISP server), expose you. very fast, not only by the gov services, also by the fauna maligna there. The TOR browser isn' specially secure, it is only a browser capable to access the TOR network. In the normal open network isn't more private as FF or any other browser, only slower and less compatible with the current web standarts, it is for what it is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yes VPN browser extensins are BS just as Proxies just within the browser I would say. All that nice stuff Firefox offers should just be done on the OS level with systemd resolved.

But the Tor network is not controlled by the NSA. The NSA is in ways also just a security agency. Tor is open source. Its very likely that the NSA, China, Russia etc. run their own servers though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

They are also in the Onion, more nowadays because of Terrorism and the current wars, its anyway a web which you must take with a grain of salt, not only because of its fauna.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

They claim to not track you then, but just to be sure I finally took the step and deleted both Facebook and Instagram.

Kinda sucks, because those are the platformed I used mostly to keep informed about local events and businesses.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Where do they claim that?

The article from Facebook I found about the subscriptions is this one: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

The only relevant thing I saw related to the topic was "while people are subscribed, their information will not be used for ads". It does not say that information will stop being collected. Just that it will not be used for ads.

So by all interpretations, there is in fact no suggestion that they will stop tracking paid users.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Safe to say that even if they did claim that they would stop, they probably wouldn’t. They’re like crackheads for peoples personal info. So fucking creepy

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Meta has this dangerous mentality that they are above the law anyway, so whatever they say, until a government powerful enough to really make them pay steps up and shows them that they are in fact not above the law, they'll just fucking do whatever they fucking want.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Well when the governments around the world give them that power when they want them to push their agenda's all the time, can't really blame them for acting like the de-facto government they've become, thanks to actual govt's. Govt's always operate above their own laws, that's nothing new.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago

Kinda sucks, because those are the platformed I used mostly to keep informed about local events and businesses.

Now you can check actual news instead of internet hive mind biased bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Given that the average phone has 35 apps installed, keeping your phone private could soon cost around € 8,815 a year.

Nice argument they found.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Only I have like 100+ apps installed? 🫣

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

It's like math at school. You prove the minimum isn't sustainable. You don't care for how far things go. If the minimum isn't viable the rest isn't either.