To be clear: I prefer to pay for things instead of having to see ads but 13€ / month!? For a meta product that has inherently user-hostile design patterns even without ads?
They don’t want you to pay. They set the price artificially high to discourage you so they continue business as usual while complying to the laws. The price is a PITA charge to make it worth their while and to still profit from the ads they would have shown you.
Just quit, these platform thrive on user generated content while selling your data and now they want money from you so you continue to create content for them.
All because they make you believe that you NEED them to stay in contact and up to date. In reality it's much nicer to speak with friends personally, show a few pics and talk about your/their experience.
Too often when i still used that social media crap people would just cut me off with "yeah i've seen that already on fb,insta etc." and no experience shared.
Being off social media, as weird as that sounds, made me feel more social and it's more fun to interact with ppl again.
I have absolutely zero faith in Instagram's ability to manage this. They can't even handle account access right. I use IG for business (I'm a performer) and have been locked out for a month with full access to my Facebook, email, authenticator app, phone, other accounts - you name it. Their shit is just straight up broken and throws error messages when trying to log in.
They profit from user-generated content and monetize your data, and now they're asking for your money to keep creating content for them.
You should walk away from these toxic platforms. In reality, there are tons of excellent software options that do not collect and sell your data while allowing you to use their services and protecting your privacy at the same time. Mastodon (I guess most of you have already heard of it), Element, SimpleX Chat, WireMin, Session, etc. I can keep listing them all day.
Phone got stolen last year. New phone, installed instagram, tried to log into account, but locked out.
Instagram tech support told me I either had to: 1) take a photo of myself, they'd check if it matched any selfies in my account, or; 2) I had to associate my Facebook profile.
I'm security conscious enough to not post selfies online, nor use Facebook. Goodbye instagram.
Anyway I don't see myself ever paying for social media LMAO, and even less now that I know about the Fediverse... Seems like a VIP lounge for us if you ask me, and I'm okay with that.
It's disappointing that they only exclude the information use regarding ads.
So they will still track everything users do and profile them, just like any other free user. And they can sell to everyone else who pays for user data (e.g. AI learning, market research etc.). With that wording, they could even sell to ad companies, if they e.g. use the data for some algorithm optimisation in their tech department. So they leave the door open to keep selling the data to 3rd parties, while already charging the user 'starting at' 12.99€.
I want to make the, "free", moniker illegal. Advertisers have to pay money for ads and they get that money from us when we buy their products. In addition to having to look at ads, we also have to pay money for the privilege of looking at them. Any ad supported service is objectively not free. No thanks.
I would normally be ok with paying for a service that offered something I valued if it meant they weren't also going to make money from me as a product. This pretty much just says it won't use your data for displaying ads. That's the least important thing to me. I am more concerned with them selling my data or giving my data to organization that are planning to harm me with it. If an app was actually useful and being updated with new user centered features rather than only new monetization features and additionally would agree not to sell my data, ever, and to let me actually delete that data on request, I'd be happy to pay that much.
They definitely coordinated this and did it with all the other social media. Is nobody buying their data anymore? Brave of them to straight up admit they're using your data for ads though, and they're implying it's a bad thing.
I've just taken the app off my phone and use adblock when I'm on the desktop browser version. I still need social media to post my work out there (I get clients that way), but I don't need to look at it 100 times a day.
It's honestly been a big quality of life improvement to take all my social media off my phone. Been a month or two now and I really miss it a lot less than I thought I would and who knows how much time I'm saving.