“Pay or Okay” on tech news site heise.de illegal, decides German DPA | Hacker News Reader

“Pay or Okay” on tech news site heise.de illegal, decides German DPA

noyb.eu

54 pointslatexr15 comments

Hopefully this decision will spread to other EU countries (after Austria and Germany).

There is another aspect that should be noted (IMHO), while I find perfectly fine that a news (or any other site) is (pay) members only, giving the alternative between paying a subscription and giving your data is clear evidence that the exchange is a barter, and as such it means that a certain amount of money is attributed to these data (and being a barter, it should be subject to taxation under most tax codes).

There were some news in February about the EPPO (European Public Prosecutor Office) pushing for this, namely looking at Meta:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34897913

It's not just heise.de, there are a ton of other websites that utilize the same approach. F.e. golem.de

It's a mess. In case of heise or golem, I just consent. In case of other websites, I usually close the tab.

Also, what should be punished is, when you consent to, the website present you a pay walled article after. So, they took my data and didn't deliver what I wanted and therefore consented.

My only possiblity is to use AdBlock. Never ever will I put it to "off".

Also major newspapers in DE employ the same tactic.

Is there an addon for the browsers to generate fake Infos? If not, would please someone take uppon this :)

There's not much to generate. The site doesn't ask you to fill in a form, it just sets a cookie and tries to sell advertising space as expensively as possible.

Which is what you should expect from a place like Heise. The same people invented/popularised a way to provide Facebook Like buttons without sending data to Facebook. Normally Facebook learns that you see the page, Heise's approach delivered data to Facebook only if/when you click Like. It's wordly in that people can like but very careful with people's personal information.

i was very surprised when i found out that heise used this ok or pay method given their reputation otherwise, and i always had the hope/suspicion that this can't be ok. i am very excited to see some progress here.

if heise can clarify exactly what i need to consent to, then it will be easier to decide. so far i have simply rejected, and gave up trying to read their articles.

When people who have a history of careful, clueful behaviour do something that surprises you, or something with which you disagree, there's a possibility that they understand something you don't.

adnauseam is similar but I'm not sure it does exactly that

Title isn’t too clear on what happened, but the intro helps:

> One of the largest German-language tech news sites, heise.de, made users choose between paying for a monthly subscription or having their personal data processed for advertising and many other purposes. The Data Protection Authority of Lower Saxony (LfD) decided that their “Pay or Okay” approach from 2021 was unlawful.

You can donate here (I just did): https://noyb.eu/en/donations-other-support-options

When past data collection is confirmed to be illegal, this should apply retrospectively. That is: it means that they don't have consent to lawfully process the data they currently hold despite any coerced "I consent" clicks they might have received, so they should be required to destroy it without any further processing in addition to any other penalties.

Serious question: how should these sites monetize? Is there a model that is fair to all parties?

Ads that don't track the user in an unlawful manner are perfectly fine, even if the user doesn't consent to tracking.

Also, in this site specifically, users can already just subscribe and pay for the content.

Indeed. I think it's also worth noting that if this is properly enforced across the board then the lower conversion rates of such non-tracking ads should be perfectly fine from a competitive perspective.

French news sites are sweating bullets, as they should!

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