Social media company Meta (formerly known as Facebook) will launch paid subscriptions for ad-free versions of both Instagram and Facebook from next month.
The announcement means users will no longer see advertisements on their feeds and their data will allegedly not be used for personalised ads either.
Users from the European Union, Liechtenstein, Norway, Iceland and Switzerland with an ad-free subscription will no longer see ads on Instagram and Facebook. They will cost €9.99 (for the website) and €12.99 (for the app). The non-paying version of both social media platforms – with (personalised) ads – will continue to exist.
Meta is now introducing these subscriptions to comply with EU regulations, it announced in a blog post on Monday. "We believe in an ad-supported internet, which gives people access to personalised products and services regardless of their economic status. But we respect the spirit and purpose of these evolving European regulations, and are committed to complying with them."
In the past year, Meta has already been reprimanded several times in Europe: in January, the company received two fines totalling €390 million from the Irish privacy watchdog for failing to comply with the rules of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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To use Facebook, people must agree to its terms of use, which state that they consent to their data being used to generate personalised ads. This means that if people do not accept these terms, they cannot use the platform – violating European privacy laws, the Irish privacy watchdog ruled.
This summer, Meta lost another similar case against the German competition authority before the European Court of Justice. The authority had banned Meta from processing Facebook users' data collected on other websites in 2019.
Meta then went to the European Court of Justice, as the US company felt that the German competition authority did not have the power to impose such a ban, but lost the case as the court ruled in favour of the competition authority.
