The "or you can give up your rights in exchange for a discount" part is the problem. You can't buy a car by agreeing to be a slave for 90 days either.

Commercial subscription services that don't violate your privacy are 100% fine, and incidentally, as xp84 noted, are way healthier because the user is at least a customer. (I dream of a day where companies spend $0 on advertising and instead all commercial websites and social media are run on small subscriptions or frictionless micropayments and the only person they need to keep happy is the customer.)

Of course "free" services have a massive advantage over paid ones. If Meta can profitably run Facebook just on generic ads without tracking, like a newspaper, that's allowed too. But if they can't, well, tough shit.

I don't agree - you can't just stop using it. Given the size of facebook (or google, amazon, microsoft, apple etc), they are ingrained in our (tech) life in such a way that one has to invest a - not negligible - amount of work to stop using them. To sum it up: companies want to have "power", but without having "responsibility".

Thats like saying, if you don’t like lead in your paint. You can just use different paint. Like yeah sure, but still some regulations that stop them from putting lead in paint is a good thing

It does not work like that, the country made some laws. For example what safety rules does the car have to follow to be legal in us. You cannot just say, if you don't like that the car does not have a backup camera doesn't use it.

In the case of the right of privacy, what is wrong with your suggestion is that it is what we have today, and we end up where we are today. You must sacrifice your right of privacy to use Facebook, Twitter and others. And using Facebook, Twitter and others is not a choice for many people. It is forced on many (most?) by rules of employment (some schools require teachers to be on Facebook for example), economic reasons (must be on social media to be economically competitive), or just social (all my friends are there, so I need to be there too). Choosing to retain your right of privacy is a sacrifice, which is to say that maintaining your right of privacy has a cost. The EU has said that there should not be a cost to preserving what it sees as a right. Not everyone can afford to pay that cost.

>> Laws generally don't allow you to sell or otherwise relinquish your rights,

> If you want to use it and not give up rights, pay money.

Ahh, we are not asking you to sell. We are asking you to give them in exchange for services.