No, it’s not. You paying them money won’t stop them from collecting data about you. It only stops them from selling it to show targeted ads.

Don’t get me wrong, I despise meta for it and think they should be prosecuted for that immediately, but that has nothing to do with the article or what the EU is saying.

Mixing these two things just cause you hate meta will get us nowhere. Their data collection of non-users is straight up illegal, but the pay with money or data model is something that especially news sites have been using for a long time now.