> Pretty sure that's legal and Meta could do it if they wanted to.

It isn't entirely that blank & white. They can't deny service for refusing to let them do something you have a legal right to refuse to let them do. They can refuse service for refusing to pay, but the relevant laws don't allow giving up your privacy rights to be equated to paying. The law doesn't allow you to “pay” for things with your human rights (of which it considers privacy one).

This leads to “pay or no service” being okie dokie, but “pay or give up right or no service” (or just “give up right or no service”) not being.

This partly comes from a desire not to create a new underclass, with some able to pay to maintain their rights and the others effectively losing them because they can't afford other options. There would be a two class system anyway (those that can pay and those that don't have the service), but not having access to facebook is not seen as threatening like not having one of your human rights (as defined by relevant law) is.

this is the key argument why pay for privacy is a problem. unfortunately, given that for now we must assume that all ads are tracking people and are thus violating users privacy, this means that any ad supported service that offers ad free service against pay including youtube and netfix are in violation of this.

solving this will be difficult. we need some way to ensure that ads are non-tracking. but i don't know how to do that.

Actually not. Those ad free services are still tracking you. There is no payment for privacy, just payment for no adverts. The data they record while you are using the paid ad-free service can still be used elsewhere, including by that service if you later stop paying to remove the ads. This is bad from a privacy PoV, but at least it is equally bad for all from a rights PoV (rather than creating classes of haves & have nots).

There are points where ads and privacy are completely separate issues. If they were separate issues generally than I'd allow many more ads but block the stalky ads/services. Not all online ads are stalky (though the vast majority are), and many ad-free sites/apps/services are still stalky (directly, or via free services that they use such as many SaaS analytics options).

free = track content views + track ad views and clicks.

paid = track content views only

the privacy implications of tracking content are different from the privacy implications of tracking ads, especially because ads can track across different content sites in ways that pure content tracking on eg youtube or netflix can not.

the problem is that the ad tracking gets shared with the advertisers whereas content tracking mostly doesn't get shared as far as i can tell.

imagine how people would react if it came out that youtube or netflix would share which content people watch. we just had a discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39808994

Perhaps less relevant to the likes of Netlfix, but youtube are certainly tracking much more than just what you watch on youtube even if you pay for no ads. They will be recording details of all the sites you visit that embed their videos, and so forth.

And while they aren't going to be sharing exact data in any way, that doesn't make business sense, I'm sure there is some sharing of indirect tracking data (cohort flags & such), as I've seen activity on youtube apparently affect what I get hawked in recommended links elsewhere.