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Comment by OptionOfT | Hacker News Reader

https://archive.ph/2025.02.09-074637/https://www.heise.de/en...

As you cannot deny cookies without paying.

Alternatively the "reader view" feature in Firefox can be used as the entire article is loaded in memory (as opposed to other websites where they'd load a preview till you agree to cookies / pay for a subscription)

Unless it's been fixed recently, Firefox Reader View inexplicably bypasses your uBlock Origin, so you actually get violated harder by using Reader View.

Is there more information on this?

And this BS comes from a German company. Oof.

Stop pushing EU-wide laws you cannot yourself adhere to.

Are they breaking the law? I don't love that they're requiring either payment or allowing cookies, but at least they're fully disclosing that and giving you the choice. I'm pretty sure that's what the GDPR requires.

This is under consideration now due to the meta case.

The GDPR states that consent should be freely given and one can argue that forcing you to choose between payment our tracking is not a free choice but cohersed. I personally think that interpretation is correct.

Since a large part of German media in also doing the same, they are lobbying for this to only apply to "large online providers".

Here is a good writeup on the situation: https://iapp.org/news/a/pay-ok-or-a-third-way-context-analys...

You forgot the 3rd option… don’t consume their content. Pay, allow cookies, or surf elsewhere. GDPR doesn’t require them to give away content for free.

Edit - ok, being downvoted - how should content be monetized if both targeted ads and subscriptions are off the table? Are we saying GDPR requires a site to operate off generic, non-targeted ads?

Targeted ads aren't the only kind of ads. Disregarding for a moment that you can do some amount of targetting without collecting PII too.

Some sites can do that. E.g. Hacker News would easily be able to do targeted advertising without collecting any data because it's a self-selected audience. Even someone like The Verge could probably do a decent job (just advertise games and tech stuff). But what the hell would The New York Times advertise? They're back at TV-style cars and perfume advertising which isn't profitable enough to sustain most businesses.

I think Google's flock was the only serious attempt to solve this, but obviously it got heavily criticised by HN fundamentalists who think that the web should be entirely free and ad-free with zero tracking. To be fair it does have a rather big practical issue in that only Google has any incentive to actually implement it (I don't see why Microsoft or Mozilla or Apple would ever bother).

We're probably stuck with tracking unless the EU gets some sense and mandates a do-not-track style preference system, and actually enforces it with fines.

Fairly sure the New York Times carried adverts for decades before computers existed

Have you somehow forgotten that physical newspapers cost money? They weren't funded solely by advertising.

Sure, but do those ads generate enough revenue to stay in business?

How is this site’s “Pay or Take a Cookie” approach worse for the consumer than a total paywall?

I’d rather we didn’t have to have annoying ads, but generating and hosting content costs money.

The downside of this approach is that the publishers don't want to remake their business model, so they make the subscription fee so high that they couldn't possibly ever lose money on people they don't track.

Then even the small part of the population that would consider going through the process of adding yet another subscription to their life either leaves or consents to tracking, because who's going to pay 5 EUR (and Heise is pretty "cheap" compared to some) for access to one article?

I would not be so angry with the concept if the costs, and the effort necessary to pay, was more in line with the income from personalised ads. Pay two cents per view with the push of a button? Sure. Pay 2 EUR for a week of access? Maybe. But so many publications want me to pay almost a print subscription price for any access, clearly showing they don't intend this as a real alternative.

They could use non-tracking ads, though I understand serving ads without spying on people is much less profitable. Or they could mandate a subscription or per-article payments, maybe only on certain long-form articles? Maybe keeping news articles behind a paywall until they're a month old, like LWN, could work? And I'm sure the subscription fees would drop dramatically once they're not just a half-hearted attempt to appease the EU.

There's plenty of options, but they can only be explored once nobody offers news in exchange for personal data. People used to pay for physical newspapers, and it worked, better than the current web approaches IMO.

"The tactic has been criticised by privacy advocates and non-governmental organisations such as NOYB and Wikimedia Europe, which claim that it is illegal under the GDPR. On 17 April 2024, the European Data Protection Board released a non-binding opinion stating that in most cases, consent-or-pay models do not constitute valid consent within the meaning of the GDPR."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_or_pay

GDPR states that consent must be freely given. If there are financial incentives, the consent may be invalid.

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