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.
