Pay for Facebook and Instagram use without ads

Megan van der Wagt

After criticism from the European Court about how Meta handles the privacy of its users, the company is now offering an alternative. Meta users are given a choice: give Meta permission to use their personal data for advertising purposes or pay € 12.99 per month not to receive personalized advertisements. The €12.99 per month applies if you use Instagram and/or Facebook on a smartphone or tablet with Android or Apple. If you use these Meta social media on a computer, you will use €9.99 per month. If you want to see this choice with your own eyes, read in this article how to create your own Instagram account and (most likely) encounter this. .

Personalized ads
Facebook and Instagram collect data from their users. This is information such as place of residence, age, education, hobbies, your contacts, likes, comments and private messages. And there are a lot of other data that Instagram and Facebook use to create personalized advertisements.
So the choice is all about personalized advertising. Meta is not allowed to offer personalized advertisements without the consent of the users. Because they have often made mistakes with this in the past and Meta received high fines as a result, they are trying to solve it with this choice. Anyone who refuses to let Meta use their data has the only option to pay. This has often resulted in negative reactions.

(article continues below image)

Fines
Meta has received many fines in recent years for the processing of user data, as they do not always handle this correctly. The highest fine occurred last July. This was a fine of 1.2 billion euros. They had ignored this by forwarding data to the United States while they did not have sufficient rights to do so. Europe is very strict when it comes to privacy. As a result, Meta has threatened to leave Europe a number of times.