Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

The law pretty much rules out advertising as a valid reason, and that they can't discriminate on showing content based on opting out of the non-valid reasons (like ads).

View on HN

Excuse my ignorance, but I'm interpreting this to mean that under GDPR users should be able to opt out of cookies and still view the content?

That doesn't seem right. Shouldn't I, the creator, be able to say "consent to having cookies or don't use my site?"

That's a moral argument, not a legal argument. GDPR codifies through law that you are unable to, legally.

That makes about as much sense (to me) as:

"Fill out this survey and you can have a candy bar"

"Nope, I won't fill out the survey but I'll still take the candy bar"

Fill out this survey, while I surreptitiously inject this GPS tracker under your skin, and you can have a candy bar.

Don't mind you noting down I stopped by, or these product posters you have up, but I'd rather not have that embedded tracker, thanks.

Don't track you? Already jabbed you, LOL...

And so the law stepped in.

Yeah but now the law creates the opposite problem:

Me: Let me serve you targeted ads and you can stream this video you want to watch, deal?

You: Nope, I'm just going to stream your video without the ads, LOL

Me: That's stealing my bandwidth

You: Nope, the EU made it legal so it's not stealing, LOL

Me: withdraws from EU

I cannot imagine being so enmeshed in the world of targeted advertising that I would care about this analogy.

The point is, it's stealing to forego the targeted ads in order to consume the content anyway.

The fair thing to do would be:

"I don't consent to targeted ads, so I'm clicking the back button and using an alternative"

Not:

"I don't consent to targeted ads, so I'm opting out of them and by the way, you get to foot the bill for whatever I decide to do next"

You can use advertisements. You can even use targeted advertisements if you're halfway smart.

What you can't use is targeted advertisement where the targeting is based on tracking.

If your business model absolutely must resort to tracking users to be successful, it's probably best and easiest to withdraw from the EU market.

Shouldn't I, the creator, be able to say "consent to having cookies or don't use my site?"

No, especially not if you're a monolopoly like Facebook or Google. For non - monopolistic sites the GDPR encourages other monetization business models such as subscriptions instead of collecting and then profiling user data.

Facebook and Google are not monopolies. There are good and plentiful alternatives to both.

At any rate, seems like GPDR punishes the freemium model which in turn punishes the poor. If I make my site subscription only then I either have to have the subscribers subsidize the free users, or bar non-paying users from my site...

Or you might have the affluent subsidize the poor. Or come up with something entirely new. And they are monopolies in that between them they are advertising on the internet. Also using social media that is like a Facebook property in function but isn't Facebook places the user into a social media desert. Gmail in its domain is similar.

Some US newspaper do this, block EU access, What people criticize in this case is where the site does not block us EU citizen because they want to track us, so they kinda implement GDPR by using the worse UX possible that probably is illegal.

If you want to say that they need the ads to function then they should not provide the convoluted way to decline tracking from 30+ trackers but just block us.

What we want is put a big Decline button near the Accept button, or put the full list of trackers directly on the popup and not send me to a Privacy Policy or a settings/configuration page. But this sites want it all, they want the EU readers and also their data and user the bad UX to make you just accept.

I just close the tab, I do not bother with workarounds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com