Facebook's new ad-free tier could end annoying consent pop-ups, but could also put a price …

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain We have reached a key juncture in the debate about online privacy, following Meta’s recent decision to offer some users paid-for ad-free access to Facebook and Instagram. The time has come to decide how much we value keeping our data, tastes and whereabouts to ourselves. The main and often only way that free-to-use online services such as Google, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok make money is by selling data about user preferences to advertisers. And since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in the EU and the UK in 2018, firms have been allowed to track and sell this data to third parties, so long as they seek your explicit consent beforehand. Most companies complied with GDPR by introducing those annoying pop-up windows that we’ve all come to know and hate when we open up a website. Popups are not explicitly required by the regulations, but they make clicking “OK” for tracking the easy choice, so they have been widely adopted by companies. Not by all companies, however. Meta, Facebook’s owner, took a different approach. It chose to ask for consent just once amid the lengthy terms and conditions you are asked to read
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