this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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I'm still curious where coercion comes into it?
Let me rephrase to avoid this hyperbole. I mean that the users are presented with two options: one being pretty much bonkers and one being agreeing to the terms. FB was seemingly unwilling to make it a clear yes/no question it is (or should be according to GDPR) everywhere else and decided this manipulation is much more likely to get them the "yes" answers.
++ Totally. 10€ a month can't be close to the value of the data. If the cost was actually based on the value of the data it might be a valid choice.
The value of the data gets tricky fast. If they made everyone pay $10 for the service, they would make less money. They would make less money because fewer people would use the service. To offer it for free means more people would use it. While each person may provide less than the subscriber, the masses of the free users makes more money than the subscriber.
To profit more from free users, you just have to have enough people willing to use it for free, and wouldn't pay for it, to where their revenue exceeds that of the $10 plus the added cost to run the service with more users using it.
Just for easy numbers, let's say a free users makes Meta $1.00 a month. If there is a group of 20 people who use meta, and only 1 of those 20 people is willing to pay $10, then the paid service would make them $10 where the unpaid service would make them $19. Obviously super simplified math, but honestly the number of people that would pay for Facebook is probably a lot less than 1 in 20.
I am not saying $10 is a fair price, but rather it's not a simple task to pick a fair price. Not that meta wants a fair price anyway.