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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I thought that was literally what the law was supposed to prevent. That is: viewers should not even be allowed to agree to data collection that is only used for tracking and not for the actual business.

A newspaper might argue that their business is tracking users so they can show ads and afford journalists, but it won’t hold up.

Of course sites will rather try to pull a stunt like this if the option is shutting down your business directly - but I sure hope regulators force sites to turn to paid content or shut down.

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> A newspaper might argue that their business is tracking users so they can show ads and afford journalists, but it won’t hold up.

I think it will hold up. Newspapers are a big factor in European the courts would not risk anything against them. Especially not if they might loose a big chunk of revenue.

It’s certainly going to be a battle. Allowing “ad-walls” like agree in order to see content they are making GDPR pointless. The law text seems pretty clear on that I think.

Q is what will actually happen if the law is interpreted the way I want/think? Newspapers are doing quite poorly already.

They'll be fined, or will change their ways under a direct threat of being fined.

> Allowing “ad-walls” like agree in order to see content they are making GDPR pointless.

Not at all: on the surface, it's the difference between "give me a dollar for a bar of candy" and "here, have a free bar of candy (and I'll help myself to a dollar (or two))".

Beneath the surface, it means that the ad-financed newspaper will have to aggregate their PII in-house (or with the help of carefully vetted partners) into targeting decisions instead of blindly throwing it over a wall to random third parties.

There's a difference, but the principle behind the GDPR is that "personal information cannot be conceived as a mere economic asset", and both those versions violate it.

You can't put forth accumulation as a legitimate use of data, as in "it might help our eventual value when the company is sold, therefore we sleep it all up" and neither would "we hand over the data, we get money, therefore it's our business" fly, but using PII in-house for running ads in a "registered, but not paying" service tier has all the trappings of legitimate interest.

Things like this don't really have a "point" until the courts give it one. And I think the courts are going to give serious consideration to the viability of the press.

The press is viable using ads, just not ads that are targeted by spying on people and selling their information. In the long run it also might be the only thing that reduces use of outright ad-blockers, which could kill industries.

But ads are not viable unless they are driven by information about the audience - down to the individual. However, I am also an advocate of returning to the "sponsorship" model - old-fashion ads, if you will. No tracking there - the sponsor just knows approx audience size and demographics.

But ads are not viable unless they are driven by information about the audience - down to the individual.

Oh totally! That’s why ads have never been a thing until the internet, and why there have never been print ads, television ads, and ads on the radio. No individual data, no ads, it all adds up.

(/s)

I didn't say "ads have never been a thing". I'm saying they are no longer viable. Sort of like horse-draw buggies were no longer viable after the arrival of the automobile.

If you’re going to claim that targeted ads are that kind of improvement over the alternative, you should present some evidence of their relative efficacy. From what I’ve seen, unless you rely solely on marketing claims, you won’t find it because the improvement is marginal at best.

They can always show the same ads as in the print edition, which are targeted to the demographic based on the content instead of targeted to a person based on their browsing history. It may not even be the case that they have less ad revenue.

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