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Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) has offered to cut its monthly subscription fee in the EU for Facebook and Instagram by almost half to €5.99 euros after discussions with privacy regulators, Reuters reported citing a senior Meta executive.
Starting in November 2023, users had the option to subscribe to the social media sites for €9.99 per month on the web or €12.99 per month on Apple’s (AAPL) iOS and Alphabet’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Android operating systems. The tech giant had said that the people — in the EU, European Economic Area, or EEA, and Switzerland — can alternatively continue to use these services for free while seeing ads that are relevant to them.
Meta has offered to reduce the price to €5.99 from €9.99 for a single account and €4 for any additional accounts, Meta lawyer Tim Lamb told a European Commission hearing, the report noted.
The move to almost half the fee came amid growing criticism from users about Meta’s no-ads subscription service, which critics say requires users to shell out a fee to ensure their privacy. Last month, several consumer groups in the EU were filing complaints with their national data watchdogs against Meta alleging breaches of the bloc’s privacy rules related to user data.
Earlier this year, Meta made the reduced offer to regulators and now is in discussions with data protection authorities, mainly the Irish regulator on the issue, the report noted.
Meta had introduced the service to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which restricted the company’s ability to personalize ads for users without their consent, potentially impacting a vital major revenue source.