Or just use a plugin that blocks jerberscript, and you can read it fine. So does uMatrix (apparently the GDPR shit is an external JS resource!).
To publishers: I'm not interested in you tracking me just for reading one text article from your website. Asking me is non-sense. Who the hell wants to customize their "tracking experience". I just want to access the content.
I'm fine if you don't want me to read the article without your tracking stuff. Please block me. But don't ask me. This is creepy and this wastes everyone's time and bandwidth. Go to a street and ask people if they would like to be followed and if they would like to customize this experience. Hell no. I don't want to. Leave me alone.
You may not care about me, but I'm sure I'm not alone. Many people are actually confused and afraid of these questions and run away. I've heard that from several people these last weeks.
"This means people must be able to refuse consent without detriment .... The GDPR is clear that consent should not be bundled up as a condition of service unless it is necessary for that service"
Source: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...
Makes me a bit annoyed now to have to go through a consent-wall like this - I can only imagine the management pouring over the "consent data" as some sort of new marketing metric about how engaged their audience is etc etc
Those consent walls are the expected consequence of GDPR.
People are given a real, free choice: Accept and access free contents or navigate away. There is no detriment and this is not a condition of sale.
One can go further and argue that consent is indeed in fact required to provide the service since this is free contents financed by ads.
The GDPR does not state that consent cannot be exchanged for anything. The GDPR will look at whether consent is necessary for the performance of a contract and/or provision of service.
So the argument that this is allowed is two-fold:
- this is free content made publicly available: There is no contract or provision of service.
- this content is provided free thanks to ads: Consent is necessary to provide the contents.
The GDPR is not meant to force companies to work for free and it does not force them to.
If you finance your service through ads then consent is required because that's how your business works and ads are your income.
If you sell books online then indeed consent is not required and you cannot make ordering books subject to consent.
I claim that the cookie-acknowledgement legislation does not add value and is clearly counterproductive. We are taught to accept that "everyone is a stalker" and "it's okay we do it, because you accepted it, didn't you read that legal disclaimer, possibly in a language you do not understand".
So this would be like, what, pretending you’re a fan to get an autograph and then revealing that the celebrity has just signed away all their rights? And then asserting that that’s legally binding?
But it got worse with GDPR (which I think is good, contrary to the previous law), and I don't care about cookies seems to take care of some of this mess.
edit: but actually I don't set settings on random web pages, therefore they should not need my consent anyway. My consent could be asked the first time I set a setting, this would not be intrusive. So maybe the cookies law was not that bad either.
Great extensions:
- uBlock Origin
- I don't care about cookies
- Dark Background and Light Text (especially good with OLED screens but slows things down a bit and there is an annoying white flash on page load, probably because of the way Web Extensions work)