It would appear that either the intelligence services of the world have all the information they need now, or, more likely, they’ve decided that all those pictures of people’s pets and lunches simply isn’t worth the expense to obtain them and effort to analyze them.
Facebook and Instagram users have blasted the launch of a new paid-for service to remove adverts from the two platforms. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company which owns the two social media sites, said it was launching the subscription option to comply with EU regulations.
The change will force millions of users to decide whether they want to face personalised adverts, or fork out the fee for an ad-free offering.
But users attacked the idea, vowing to delete their accounts rather than pay for the privilege of no ads. The monthly subscription plans will cost €9.99 for web users, while iOS and Android users will have to shell out €12.99 a month. They will not be available in the UK.
I find it interesting that while UATV and SG have been criticized on occasion for requiring paid subscriptions for access – never mind that we were starting from complete scratch with no corporate stock market billions to spend on infrastructure – the realities of the market imposing itself is proving that it was the correct strategy from the start.
And notice that UATV+SG is half the price of the Facebook services, which shows how heavily these “free” services were being subsidized all along.
Facebook may be claiming that it’s only instituting subscriptions in order to comply with EU regulations, but you can be certain that it’s eventually going to do the same thing in the USA.