Proposed European privacy laws might make it harder, if not impossible, for free online services like Facebook and Gmail, which rely on ad-related revenue, to continue to offer their services for free. The laws would make it harder for these companies to use targeted advertising because they would limit how they could collect, analyze, and sell users’ data. The amendments to the laws are aiming to better protect users’ privacy, but their unintended consequences might mean that legislators have to rethink their wording.

The lawyer who is warning about these consequences is saying that it’s likely the wording will be changed before the amendments are passed, but it is still scary to think about. Facebook is in a precarious position. It needs to make its users happy, but it also needs to be able to earn money, because if it doesn’t, then it will not be able to provide Facebook for free with or without ads.

There is a tradeoff to be made if you want to have a free online service like Facebook. These sites make their money through advertising, and so naturally, they want to make their advertising as effective as possible by using the data you give to the site to more effectively target ads to your interests. But some users feel that this violates their privacy, and they may be right. The European Union thinks so. So the question is, are the services provided by Facebook important enough to give up a little bit of privacy? It’s a question that must be answered individually. What’s right for one person’s privacy could be entirely wrong for another’s.

I work for Net Nanny and all opinions are my own.