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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

In this case I think it's justified [0] to offer an alternate reporting: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6y42jggdyo

> European banks have seen widespread unauthorised direct debits from PayPal accounts, the German Savings Banks Association (DSGV) says.

> The German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) says payments worth in the region of 10 billion euros (£8.6bn) have had to be blocked, after PayPal's fraud-checking system failed.

[0] I was impeded by cookie popups and adblock/privacy-mode blockers in another language, and neither are direct reports or superior details.

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Better link: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Paypal-German-banks-apparently-...

Maybe it’s a better link, but I can only read the content if I accept their sharing my data with 180 partners.

https://archive.is/6h2TN

Which is the same as many if not most of the other sites we regularly link to on HN. You just aren't told about it.

If I have to accept it I think that's even worse than doing typical tracking behind my back.

Also requiring acceptance from EU users would be a GDPR violation, I think? But it didn't ask me at all so I can't evaluate it well.

I think it is great that they are forced to show whats going one. Otherwise we wouldnt even discuss, just no one would care.

Forced to show is better than going behind my back.

But making me click an "accept" button is just dirty. I hate that.

Nobody is making you. You are given a choice.

This company needs to get paid. For that it uses ads and other means, just like everyone else does. Their list of ads, tracking and other partners happens to be around 200. They tell you and you either choose to accept that, read their content for "free" (like you use other content/apps for "free") or actually choose to say "No, if "free" costs me this, then I don't want it".

And some really aren't even to "sell your data" but just their own analytics to let their dev/SRE staff see what's going on. Nothing nefarious at all.

Nobody forces you to accept this and read their content.

Heck, your online banking/brokerage probably uses a bunch of trackers you probably aren't aware of, because they don't tell you. Go open the network tab in dev tools and check.

Yeah I know I could leave. But if the site won't let me say no, then it shouldn't pretend to give me an option.

If they're acting like the GDPR applies, these choices are invalid. If they're not extending that courtesy, then I'd rather be left alone about it.

And they're allowed to have ads without getting consent. It's the tracking that's a problem.

And there's no chance in hell that data isn't being sold when there are hundreds of partners.

No, the GDPR is making _them_. Gating content behind "consent" for tracking isn't allowed. They have the choice to then show content with generic trackers.

You are not required to accept the tracking. You can pay to remove tracking with their "Pur-Abo".

That is definitely a GDPR violation (for users in the EU).

And heise.de has already gotten in trouble for this before.

That is not a GDPR violation, no. Most German newspapers do this, and it has been tried in court - it's legal. The court only mandated that the subscription fee cannot be substantially higher than the value of the data that would have otherwise been sold.

Yeah it is, if courts decided otherwise then courts decided wrong, the GDPR is very clear and explicit about this:

> Consent is presumed not to be freely given if [...] the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance.

exactly IMHO this whole thing being dragged out/tolerated for this many year needs to criminal investigation into corruption and bribes

Even under that idea, I very strongly doubt the subscription fee is in that range.

It's basically the status quo for German websites. This seems legally settled for now unless some appellate court strikes it down, and even that won't happen any time soon.

As a user it's just odd to see German websites do this so differently from Dutch or British websites.

What should be made illegal is how all those German popups do this really grating 3D animation effect upon closing. Do you know what I mean? Not the one at heise.de, but most of these forms seem to have this built in.

Most website also tried to click a hundred different buttons to opt out - that wasn't legal either. Just because enforcement hasn't caught up yet doesn't mean it's not a GDPR violation.

> That is not a GDPR violation, no. Most German newspapers do this,

and pretty much all of them are in GDPR violation

just due to long dragged out court proceeding and a lot of lobby power or lets be honest corruption there have been no wide spread consequences

btw. a lot of them have a very hidden 3rd "no tracking, no payment" option which might display non-targeted ads based on the content viewed and is the actual legal required alternative (instead of the "pure abo") this is still not quite legal but much easier to worm yourself through the legal system with

yeah, but a choice between "ad+tracking" and "no-ads,no-tracking,payment" is not GDPR compliant. It's just that a huge part of EU newspapers do not like it leading to very long outdrawn court proceedings, and other issues.

Basically GDPR says you have to make it as simple to use your site with and without "tracking".

The important part here is it says "without tracking" not "without ads", so the choice presented is intentional deceptive and misleading. There is no technical reason to not have GDPR complaint ads, it's just that web ad market is dominated by a few quasi monopolies (leading Google) and they don't like "not targeted" advertisement at all.

What they theoretically have to provide is the choice between "targeted ad, tracking", "untargeted ad, no tracking" or "no ad, no tracking, payment".

Oh, valid point. I actually hate heise.de's approach to hard-require consent to ad-tracking (or payment). As my university has a subscription for heise.de, I was not shown the consent popup and forgot about that. Sorry.

South Park once had a good scene about just not accepting random things that pop up (in HumancentiPad). If you see something popping up on a website - maybe just delete the pop-up from the HTML. (Click on Inspect - Examine - Delete).

Heise is a bit nasty with technology, and it's a bit harder to get rid of their thing, but I can read everything without accepting anything.

I default to the Reader mode (Safari/Firefox) such a blessing to stop any/all videos, sounds, ads, and popups.

Putting the "text" back into HTTP, hyper text transfer protocol.

Yes, I agree. At the time this was the only English link I found. The BBC is much better, and it's a European issue. I cannot edit the link or title.

You can email the mods and ask them to do so. Footer contact link and mention “FP #x” somewhere in the subject.

What’s "FP" for?

front page?

Maybe, but it seems odd that someone would refer to a submission by a numeric ranking that changes constantly.

Hey I’ve seen people use email addresses as unique, immutable identifiers so who knows what crazy thing people will do.

Okay, I guess. Half of that is a far more understandable mistake, and the other half makes things easier for everyone.

If you wish to refer to the submission uniquely in the subject, as of a few years ago anyways they requested appending ` (1235676423)` to the end of it with the ?id=1235676423 of the comment/post/whatever that you're writing about. I tend to do so more in emails sent from a keyboard than from a mobile phone for UI reasons.

False Positive of course. Why type of a full word with no ambiguity when you can confuse everyone with some obscure abbreviation ?

Floating point?

Functional Programming

Furry Platform

Fix Pls

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