According to the New York Times, Meta may add a paid membership option to Instagram and Facebook in Europe. This version of the service would be a way to respond to European privacy requests.

Yes but why make consumers pay for a privacy law? The key point is that privacy policies are one of the factors they cut earnings. It happens because if it is more difficult to profile people, then the same advertisement is worth less.

In other words, if I may tell my client hey, i will show your commercial to precisely the people you want to see it, then they can sell the service for a price. If I can’t offer that kind of targeting precise, I have to do lower prices.

According to the NYT however the free versions will continue to exist in Europe, and even those will have to comply with privacy rules. For us Europeans, therefore, it could simply be one more option: who wants to take the “premium” app without ads, while everyone else will continue to use it in its current form. With the difference, possibly, of seeing advertisements that are less relevant to one’s personal profile.

But then what’s the use? Well, according to sources cited by the NYT, the offer of an ad-free paid variant could help “alleviate the concerns of some European regulators”, even if few people will use it. The optional layer “could serve Meta’s interests in the region,” they added.

In short, the aim would be only to allow Meta to say we have an option that respects the rules and people can choose it. Something the Old World authorities would hardly like, but would buy some time.

In May the EU gave Meta a fine of 1.2 billion euros for moving European citizens’ data to US-based servers. In addition, the company was fined €265 million in 2022 for failing to prevent the mobile numbers of millions of Facebook users (and other data) from being mined and published online.

“This shows that tech companies are complying with EU digital regulations, which suggests they are still beholden to governments and not the other way around,” a Columbia University law professor told the New York Times.