Meta’s new subscription model in the EU is coming under direct fire for violations of GDPR, with a new lawsuit brought up by eight consumer groups across Europe.

In a controversial move last year, Meta introduced a payment option to users of Facebook and Instagram, offering an ad-free experience for a price. The ad-free experience – which costs users €9.99/month on web or €12.99/month on mobile – prevents users from seeing any advertisements on the platforms.

Those who do not opt to pay, however, will continue to have their data collected, tracked, and sold to third parties.

The move came after the EU ruled that, under GDPR, Meta did not have a legitimate legal basis to collect personal data and therefore would have to provide users the free and fair choice to opt out of data tracking.

Their new policy however provides users with an option to pay for privacy, which experts and data privacy advocates immediately lambasted as providing an unfair choice to users.

A complaint against “pay-or-consent” model is now being formally launched by eight consumer groups in the BEUC network with their national data protection authorities against the tech giant.

This compounds the complaint filed last year by BEUC and 19 of its members with consumer protection authorities to denounce Meta’s “misleading and aggressive” practices.

“Meta has tried time and time again to justify the massive commercial surveillance it places its users under. Its unfair ‘pay-or-consent’ choice is the company’s latest effort to legalise its business model,” Usula Pachl, deputy director general of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) said.

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“But Meta’s offer to consumers is smoke and mirrors to cover up what is, at its core, the same old hoovering up of all kinds of sensitive information about people’s lives which it then monetises through its invasive advertising model.

“Surveillance-based business models pose all kinds of problems under the GDPR and it’s time for data protection authorities to stop Meta’s unfair data processing and its infringing of people’s fundamental rights.”