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Comment by bluelu | Hacker News Reader

And meanwhile, all the big newspapers in germany ask you to consent to individual tracking (and sharing to third parties) whenever you access their websites. Since they are not Meta, it seems to be completely acceptable.

(Example: https://www.spiegel.de/)

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My understanding of the situation : there are not infinite resources available to the various governments. So their strategy is to start at the top of the pile, and address the most visible / impactful cases. The hope is that this will then incite the smaller fish to get their stuff in order.

This is not completely stupid : there are more people with a Facebook account than there are people with a der Spiegel account?

Big German newspapers give you an option to allow their personalized ads or to pay a subscription to access their content. You have a choice. Besides, they are not tracking you everywhere. Spiegel will not care if you visited Zeit or Bild.

On the other side, Meta doesn't give you a choice. They and their numerous services are tracking you across the globe.

I would be happy if Meta refuses to provide you any of their services and track me across the internet unless I go to meta.com and accept their terms and conditions.

(Including across many mobile/tablet/smart tv apps that people would never consider. Some bug tracking SDKs report to Meta, as does every app that allows you to log in with Facebook (even if you log in another way).)

Are you saying that they force users to consent in order to access the sites, or are you making a totally ridiculous comparison?

The Spiegel home page shows - as a lot of other newspapers - either "subscribe to read ad free" or "read with ads and your datas will be sold"...

Actually, it's the best way for me to stop reading some newspaper...

In fact, less and less newspaper allow you to disagree to tracking and show only standard ads

Yeah, most of my GDPR complaints for some egregious behaviour just went to /dev/null (I guess because they were about local telecom and service companies, important for national interest).

GDPR seems to be more and more about getting handouts from US companies and lacks an effective enforcement path for smaller violators.

How do you know that your complaints were ignored? The regulators in charge of enforcing GDPR are famously understaffed, some with multi-year backlogs.

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