Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don’t agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram::Meta is considering offering ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram for $14 a month – but only in Europe.
I hope that also includes WhatsApp. Europeans are addicted to that shit.
Shit? It works across all platforms, in all countries, unrestricted and unpaid, and thus far, adfree. That’s pretty great, if you ask me.
Its pretty good deal until you consider what facebook gets out of it. Privately owning the primary source of communication that a large chunk of the world uses because its free and convenient will surely have no repercussions to end users later down the line once they end the ‘grow service as quickly as possible at cost’ phase and enter the ‘lets squeeze our users for every penny we can to get back profit and because we know they ll take it since our service is too convenient to give up’ phase.
Oh who am I kidding like anyone who uses whatsapp or any meta owned service cares about things like privacy as long as they get their free communication they are happy as peaches and will take any amount of corpo dicking
It’s end to end encrypted, so they don’t get to see any of my communication. They know who I’m talking to through my metadata, and can probably estimate where in the world I am, but that’s about it.
Sure, Signal would be better, but people are notoriously hard to adapt, so that’s wishful thinking at best.
Key words: “thus far”
Facebook wouldn’t have acquired it if they didn’t have plans to squeeze the living soul out of it. In due time. Their hope is that by then, all alternatives will be wiped out, and with it being so integrated as a daily driver, we’ll be paying a subscription, with no E2EE, sharing metadata (which btw is sometimes more valuable than the content of your messages) unwillingly.
What’s funny/crazy too is that all the top execs (including Zuck himself) use Signal. That’s the irony of the digital world we live in: the closer you are to these technologies, the more you learn, and the less subjected to it you actually wanna be.
And so is the rest is the rest of the world, especially India and South America, afaik. God, I wish we could get rid of it once and for all.
I’m not addicted. I hate it. It’s a horrible chat app. I especially hate the lack of threads (or at least pinned posts) in groups, I have to scroll through pages of garbage to see that important announcement. I also hate that it’s linked to my phone. If I want to use it on my computer, because I hate typing on phones, it needs my phone to be always connected.
I’m stuck with it because everyone else is using it.
You mean you keep using this thing despite hating it? Now I’ve known a few addicts in my time and that is pretty much the definition…
