Charging Aussies to use Facebook and Instagram? Meta won’t rule it out if ‘extreme’ privacy reforms are adopted
Social media giant Meta won’t rule out charging users to access Facebook and Instagram should “extreme” proposed privacy reforms be adopted by the government.
The extraordinary suggestion was more a gentle warning than a pointed salvo, but the company is concerned enough about the Attorney-General’s wide-ranging Privacy Act probe that it has sent a senior executive to Australia for meetings.
Melinda Claybaugh, director of privacy policy for Meta, broadly supports the modernisation of existing legislation and led the development of Meta’s lengthy submission to the Commonwealth, which is released today.
Meta’s Melinda Claybaugh.
Of the 116 proposed changes to the Act, Meta supports all but 10 – two of which in particular it said threaten to “undermine the value of personalised internet services that we all know, love and enjoy”.
Should the reforms pass in full as-is, Australia would have the toughest comprehensive privacy law in the world – and would be the first to radically regulate targeted advertising.
The latter has Meta particularly alarmed, Claybaugh said.
“I think it’s fair folks are considering what controls might be important to give people, but I think this proposal goes much further by allowing people to opt out fully from targeted advertising – [but it] would require companies to still provide their services.”
A mechanism that shuts off Meta’s very powerful and incredibly profitable offering, where brands and marketers can near-perfectly fine-tune their messaging direct to consumers, would have consequences, she said.
Ads “allows companies to provide free or reduced cost services” and their removal would force some to “reconsider providing those services for free” – including Meta.
“You’re essentially forcing companies to look at other revenue models,” she said.
When asked if one revenue stream could be Meta charging an user access fee for Facebook and Instagram, Claybaugh replied: “Look, it’s early days.”
She continued: “We don’t know what [the reforms] are ultimately going to look like. I think it’s just the truth – it’s the fact of the matter that companies that rely on ads to provide free services would be forced to find another revenue source.”
When pushed again on whether the company was hinting at extreme consequences for major legislative changes – akin to temporarily shutting down news organisations’ access to Facebook during the war over the media bargaining code – Claybaugh deferred to Meta’s head of public policy in Australia, Josh Machin.
“It’s just too early in the process to know exactly what some of the implications of some of these privacy proposals [might be],” Machin said. “We’ll see where the government lands.”
It’s not just the opt-out provision that Meta objects to, but also the broad framing of what constitutes ‘targeting’.
It makes sense in some ways, Claybaugh said. Concerns about targeted advertising to children or the use of sensitive data are valid.
“We agree generally with the idea that high-risk targeting, or targeting to certain populations, may carry some risk that warrants mitigation.”
But Meta already mitigates those risks, she insisted, adding: “For example, we don’t allow advertisers to target ads to people based on sensitive data. We don’t allow invasive targeting of kids under 18.”
The worry for Meta is the definition could be applied more broadly to content – not just ads – and that has significant implications.
“We think about personalisation as the ads we see, but really, targeting and personalisation is also about the content you see. The concern is you have to be able to target and personalise content to serve age-appropriate content to people under 18… and to detect [and filter] problematic content.”
Meta calls for some of the proposed changes to be “re-designed to more precisely address the risks” that exist around data and personalisation, and that an overall package of reforms be implemented in stages.
Ha ha ha! Charging for Facebook? Empty threats.
Most of what Meta does on privacy already it only does so because GDPR forced them to (eg right to export and delete your data)
Aussies deserve the same protections as the UK and EU citizens. Cavalier use of our data has already led to a number of horrendous breaches and more are to come or have not been reported.
We need GDPR equivalence now – for consumers and for businesses so they up their game.
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Charging to use Facebook? Ask Elon how that’s going for Twitter at the moment. Social media is cheap entertainment, until it’s not cheap. Then people leave.
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If “extreme proposed privacy reforms be adopted by the government”, then my private information would be more valuable to Meta.
So I won’t rule out charging Facebook and Instagram for access to my private information.
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Web3 might well see off Meta. We shall see. There is some enormous value with Meta and I am perplexed why Zuck and his merry minions haven’t tapped into it and created a business out of it. Madness tbf!?!
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Bad enough with all the adds on Facebook now but if you decide to charge us for the use of same I for one will delete my account and I know plenty of other people who will do the same
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