I guess it raises a fundamental question: If not ads, what else would Facebook male money off? Running the operations is costly and something has to pay for it.

I am aware that Norways ban is temporary (and I'm hella glad that at least the EU/European countries stand up to big tech on data security), but just not allowing the use of user data will probably not work as a solution.

Wikipedia's model sounds nice, but the cost of operations are by magnitudes different. I think it's a question that will also affect other platforms (like it did affect reddit and will affect Lemmy at some point).

[–] pazukaza@lemmy.ml 32 points 1 year ago

They created a business model around violating user privacy. Imagine if I asked "if slavery is no longer legal, how will the cotton fields be profitable?"

So, now being more realistic, just do ads without tracking people. Maybe ask people which types of ads they want to see instead of fucking spying on them to know every detail of their lives.

[–] snaggen@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago

You can show ads without tracking the user and violate privacy. But they are not just selling ads, they also collect user data and sell that. So, the correct question would be, how can they adapt to survive on just selling ads?