[HN] Ad-free Facebook, Instagram access planned for $14 per month in Europe

Nice to have the option I suppose but when Instagram suspended my account for "breaking community guidelines" when I rarely posted to begin with I was done with them.

I'm 80 percent sure they did it just to get my phone number since that is step 1 in the begging process to get my account back.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Meta is preparing to charge EU users a $14 monthly subscription fee to access Instagram on their phones unless they allow the company to use their personal information for targeted ads.

Several social media platforms, which for years made all their features available for free, have recently begun to charge for extras, as their traditional ad businesses come under pressure from privacy regulations and marketers become more selective with their budgets.

Snapchat and X, formerly Twitter, also sell optional subscriptions offering paying users exclusive features, such as verified profiles, custom app themes and fewer ads.

The Silicon Valley-based company has until the end of November to comply with a Luxembourg court ruling from this year which found that Facebook “cannot justify” the use of personal data to target consumers with ads unless it gains their consent.

The Digital Markets Act, which comes into force in March, imposes new legal obligations on companies to share data with rivals to promote fair competition.

In May, Facebook, which is owned by Meta, was fined a record €1.2 billion for violating privacy laws that required appropriate safeguards of transfers of data from the EU to the US.

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