Meta Pop-Up in Portugal Forces Expats to Decide: Fee or Ads

For anyone scrolling through Facebook or Instagram in Portugal this week, a new pop-up is impossible to miss. It asks whether you would rather hand over €7.99 each month or hand over your personal data. The choice encapsulates the latest tug-of-war between Meta and European regulators, a contest that could change how every foreign resident in Portugal experiences social media, runs advertising campaigns or even recruits staff.

What Portuguese Users Are Seeing on Their Screens

A short, almost cordial, message now appears in Portuguese and English: pay a modest fee for an ad-free feed or stay for free and allow Meta to use “your activity and information from partners” to tailor commercials. The notice replaces the company’s previous assumption that interesse legítimo was a sufficient legal basis. By switching to outright consent, Meta is attempting to comply with the 2023 ruling from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) that banned behavioural advertising without explicit permission. In practical terms, anyone who clicks “Continue for free” agrees that Meta may analyse likes, location, device details, contact lists and marketplace ratings to determine which car, language school or yoga retreat shows up next in the feed.

How the “Pay or Consent” Offer Works

Meta’s argument is simple: personalised ads fund the free version of its social networks. Opting out of data-fuelled targeting therefore carries a price tag. For €7.99 a month—or €13.99 if your Facebook and Instagram accounts share the same login—you obtain an experience stripped of commercial breaks. Crucially, Meta pledges it will “no longer process” your data for advertising once the subscription is activated. Yet the promise has limits. Basic information, such as age, broad location and security logs, continues to be stored under the banner of “service provision.” That distinction matters if you are, for instance, an expat running a small bakery in Porto: paying for silence on your personal profile does not automatically silence the ads you buy for your own business page.

Why Brussels Is Watching Closely

European officials view the binary offer as a potential “false choice.” The Commission opened a formal inquiry under the Digital Services Act (DSA) after consumer groups argued that the paywall pressures users into surrendering data. Regulators also contend that the monthly fee might be high enough to deter students, pensioners or low-income migrants, thereby undermining the freely given criterion that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires for valid consent. If the Commission decides Meta’s framework fails that test, fines could reach 6% of the company’s global turnover—roughly the size of Portugal’s entire annual health budget.

Potential Impact on Foreign Residents and Businesses

For many expatriates, Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Stories are informal lifelines: they find apartments in Lisbon, clients in the Algarve or English-speaking babysitters in Cascais. The subscription option may erode the platform’s reach if significant numbers decide advertisements are no longer worth the intrusion and simply walk away. On the other hand, entrepreneurs who rely on micro-targeting might discover that their carefully built custom audiences shrink, while ad prices inch up. A growing number of digital marketers report that Meta is already testing “less personalised” campaigns, relying on contextual cues instead of precise profiles, which could feel like a return to pre-smartphone advertising for niche services such as international tax consulting or craft-beer tours.

Looking Ahead: Political Ads and AI Training

Even more disruption looms. Meta has said it will ban all political, electoral and issue-based advertising across the EU once the new Transparency Regulation takes effect in October. That means no paid posts about municipal housing referendums in Madeira, no boosting of diaspora voting drives and no corporate advocacy on renewable-energy policy. Simultaneously, the company plans to feed public photos, captions and comments—excluding WhatsApp chats—into large language models that power its next wave of generative AI. Although Meta insists it will respect local privacy law, the Portuguese regulator CNPD has hinted it may follow Italy’s lead and demand proof that such data scraping is justified.

Foreign residents therefore face a complex trade-off: accept deeper data mining, pay a monthly fee, or rethink reliance on Meta’s platforms altogether. Whatever choice each user makes, the era of invisible data collection in Portugal is drawing to a close, replaced by explicit negotiations—one pop-up at a time.