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Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

What the fuck is this dark pattern? You must agree to ads before later revoking consent?

Well, at least they're being upfront about it: You can pay or get ads + tracking (or, the hidden third option: leave the site).

this is very common across German websites. I assumed it was a common pattern elsewhere too!

Are you saying German sites doesn't follow the law (only freely given consent is legal)?

The law is not that absolute in this respect and there have been cases before higher courts accepting "data in exchange for value" contracts under some conditions. There are also legal opinions out there that this is illegal but note that there is a controversy here.

I also don't understand how this can be in legal in the sense of the GDPR, but AFAIK there are multiple German news sites which use this pattern (e.g. Golem, Heise and Spiegel from the top of my head).

Why would it be a GDPR violation? As I understood it, the point of the GDPR is to prevent people from being tracked without knowing about it and consenting to it. Here the consent button is as obvious as it could be, you really can't miss it.

The problem is that you have to give your tracking consent freely, which means, that you should have no disadvantage if you don't consent. However, being awarded the right to read the news for free after giving your consent can hardly be considered 'freely'.

I don't care much about this case in particular, because I don't use their pages much anyway, but from my understanding, the correct approach would be, to simply use ads without tracking for the people who don't consent.

Consent is given freely, otherwise it is coercion.

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