Meta is considering offering ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram for $14 a month – but only in Europe.
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.
Earlier this year, I made a small experiment: I stopped checking my Facebook for three months. During that time, I received about 250 notifications of new posts by my friends. When I logged back in, out of the first 100 posts on my feed, 24 were from my friends and another 7 from groups I subscribed to. The rest were ads or "suggested" content. Checking my feed every day after that, I averaged 2 posts from my friends and 2 from my groups in the top 20 posts. I have since stopped checking Facebook altogether, and by this time I don't think even anonymized ads will get me back.
I only used FB in a dedicated virtual machine, with vanilla Chromium in Incognito mode. So, I got the full experience, and I hope I limited my ad relevancy (on my main VM, I use Firefox with Ghostery and Ublock Origin, which I hope stops FB button trackers).
Not satire, and not great lengths. I treat Windows as a shell, which runs virtual machines dedicated to specific jobs. I have an office VM, gaming VM, etc. It's safer, better organised, lower maintenance, and at current levels of computer power, performant without being a drag on my computer resources.