Facebook and Instagram users in Britain will now have to PAY £3.99/month
Published by RawNews1st
Facebook and Instagram users in Britain will now have to pay a monthly fee to avoid being targeted with personalised adverts.
The fee will cover all Facebook and Instagram accounts registered with the Meta Accounts Center, with an automatic charge of £2 on web and £3 on mobile for each additional account.
In the coming weeks, users will be offered the choice to pay £2.99/month on web or £3.99/month on iOS and Android for an ad-free experience.
Meta says that the increased price for iOS and Android users is due to the fees charged by Google and Apple for access to their services.
This comes as a major reversal in strategy for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously claimed Facebook would never charge users to remove ads.
Meta claims that the change is necessary due to new regulations from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), requiring users to clearly consent to their data being used in advertising.
That means users who do not pay will be considered as having consented to their personal information being used to target them with adverts.
In a statement, Meta says: ‘It will give people in the UK a clear choice about whether their data is used for personalised advertising.’
All UK users over the age of 18 will see a notification offering the choice to subscribe to Facebook and Instagram to avoid being targeted with adverts.
Meta says that this notification will be dismissible ‘at first’ to allow users time to consider the choice before ‘a decision is required’. Users who choose not to pay the fee will not see their service change and will continue to be targeted with adverts as they are now.
However, non-subscribing users will still have the ability to influence their advertisement choices through the ‘Ads Preferences’ settings.
For users under 18, the experience of Facebook and Meta will not change.
Meta claims that, in the UK, age and location are the only pieces of information used to target teenagers with specific adverts.
This major change is particularly surprising given that Mr Zuckerberg has specifically ruled out this exact revenue model in the past.
