Submitted 1 month ago by ilikecoffee@lemmy.world to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2f545d1e-9dbb-411d-9ac8-b07cf6afca6e.jpeg
Was trying to read a news story and… What fresh shitfuckery is this? Why do I now have to pay money to a company just for the privilege of not being spied upon and not getting your cookies that I don’t want or need? How is this even legal?
I’m pretty sure this is illegal under GDPR. They’re just seeing how long they can get away with it for, before they have to apologise and get no punishment.
I’m seeing this kind of thing on an ever increasing number of sites in Germany. It’s especially galling on sites I already pay a subscription fee for! Isn’t that enough? Now I’m supposed to pay another monthly subscription to avoid tracking cookies?
I’ve already cancelled one news website due to this, letting them know why (they’re small enough that I know they read it, since it was part of a conversation). Fat lot of good it’ll do, but …
I wouldn’t call what they’re asking for a subscription – it’s ransom.
Indeed. There must be no downside to clicking no. Consent must be freely given.
Although I’d argue almost nobody complies with the spirit of the law. Popping up a consent form every time you visit unless you accidentally click accept and then never asking you again doesn’t feel like consent was truly given.
Well, to be fair, “Why can’t websites just remember that I said no to cookies?”
Unfortunately, at least in Germany it’s legal. There was a special ruling recently.
(Link in German)
This appears to be a US specific website, where they could get away with the geoblocking technique to bypass gdpr
It’s The Sun. A British newspaper.
Sadly it is not, as you can pay to access content or pay by viewing ads.
Facebook uses the same model.
If you don’t want the “premium content” by paying with way 1 or way 2, you can’t use the site.
The best part of this is you would need to give them your personal information to pay them, and you’d need to accept the necessary cookies for them to know you’ve paid. 🤣🤣🤣
you’d need to accept the necessary cookies for them to know you’ve paid when you access the website
Cookies that are required for operational purposes (like knowing if the user is logged in) don’t require consent.
Yeah fair enough, I was just highlighting the irony.
I am really fucking sick and tired of every goddamn company thinking they’re entitled to colonize my property and hack it to serve them instead of me.
My computer is my property, you fascist fucks, not yours, and my actual property rights trump your Imaginary “Property” “rights” (i.e. temporary government-granted privileges) every single time and in every single circumstance!
I broadly agree with your sentiment, in particular computing equipment that I purchase and ongoing trends in tech (like smart TVs) that are abusive to consumers.
However, I find this argument not terribly persuasive in this particular case. The content of a website isn’t an extension of your property. It is not even public property. Visiting a site is voluntary. You clearly didn’t pay for accessing the site, nor was it subsidized through a social program. So exactly how should content (regardless of how trashy it is) be funded? Statements like “rights” (i.e. temporary government-granted privileges) suggest you are espousing libertarian views, but at the same time, you are not expressing willingness to pay for a service privately?
I dunno, it just comes across as demanding a handout. Meanwhile, not visiting websites that don’t meet your vision for how funding content should be done seems like a perfectly simple and reasonable approach to have for this problem.
The content of a website isn’t an extension of your property.
No, but it is my property which is to be used to store files that this company has put there, just so they can track me across the web to sell me more crappy shit I do not need.
So exactly how should content (regardless of how trashy it is) be funded?
With ads, but either be good and use ads that arent spyware, or let me choose to opt out of the tracky ones and use general ads instead.
Meanwhile, not visiting websites that don’t meet your vision for how funding content should be done seems like a perfectly simple and reasonable approach to have for this problem.
Yup, hence why I noped outta there as soon as I saw that popup cause fuuuck that…
Yeah exactly!
No you don’t.
The site is trash so you leave.
Oh no. It’s not like that. They don’t even ask you about cookies any more.
This is a payment so they don’t sell all your cookie data to their 1354 trusted data partners/advertising vultures.
I find it amusing that they “use cookies to give you the best possible experience”, but then ask you to pay to not have them.
you get ads whether pay or not. keep your money
Solution: don’t read that shitrag. It was always a waste of paper, now it is a waste of bandwidth as well.
Not the f’n point
But a fair point nonetheless.
Only thing the papers were good for was paper mache
This is a legitimate option per EU guidelines btw. They just want you to accept cookies.
I’m pretty sure the EU rejected this. Facebook tried the same thing (payment in exchange for ad-free experience) and the EU said it wasn’t compliant because every user should have the freedom to opt out of tracking without having to pay.
EU Withdrawal Act effectively retained all applicable EU law as UK law so anything would have to be specifically rescinded after that.
I don’t think anything’s changed wrt gdpr
Why are you trying to read the Sun? Brain cancer is a terrible disease. Don’t do this to your family.
Not the f’n point my dude
This is happening because the site is shitty so don’t use the shitty site. Sounds pretty f’n on-point to me.
It’s legal because the Sun is a private company and they have the right to charge you to not datamine you. It’s not a public service and they’re not the only source of news out there, so you have a choice: if you don’t like it, get your news elsewhere.
What’s the problem exactly?
I’m no fan of ads, but you’re right. Expecting everything for free with no ads is just greedy.
I don’t mind ads, but I don’t expect to be tracked around the internet. It’s like every website you visit being able to view your browser history. That’s private information.
Give me all the ads you want but at least give me the option whether they’re personalised or not… Why is this now a paid choice? The companies get paid by the advertisers either way, right? I’m not expecting it for free but I don’t like thousands of unknown companies tracking me thank you very much.
Expecting everything for free with no ads is just greedy.
In this case you’re not paying to not have ads. You’ll still get ads; they just won’t be personalized.
Personalized ads are more valuable to advertisers, so it still makes sense for them to charge a bit for it, but it’s not something I’ve seen before.
I’m guessing they charge a decent amount more than the difference, though - and probably even more than they make from personalized ads per person. On that note, I really wish ad free subscriptions were closer to the revenue providers get from serving ads - if they were, I’d be more willing to pay for them than just running an adblocker all the time. YouTube Premium, for example, costs 14 USD monthly, but annual ad revenue per non premium user was 1.21 USD.
A naive question of mine, but isn’t using a browser/extensions that silently/transparently blocks cookies (such as Brave, but not just it) enough to fearlessly click “Accept All Cookies”, since ultimately they would be pointless for the purpose of tracking (due to the browser’s own cookie blocking capabilities)?
Yeah it would. But as I said elsewhere, this is probably enough to be ‘too much effort’ for the majority of users, and definitely a lot more effort than it should be. I already know several people who habitually click accept all on cookie banners, and I know I have caught myself doing that a couple times too…
It asks to play DRM content but plays videos anyway.
Their devs must be so sick of their business dept.
I’d be surprised if it was just the business department…
How is that not extortion?
Because you aren’t compelled to use their site.
It’s the Sun. No one should use their site. They’re doing you a favour by showing you they’re assholes the second you land on their site.
True, but shouldn’t I be able to use it if I want to without having to choose between paying money or being spied on?
LibreWolf (which doesn’t store any cookies or other website data by default, unless you allow it) + I still don’t care about cookies or Consent-O-Matic
Hm… Was gonna try Arkenfox one of these days tbh.
When I was working on data protection issues, I asked a specialist lawyer more than two years ago how something like this could be reconciled with the GDPR. He couldn’t answer the question, but said that with the best will in the world he couldn’t imagine that this would be OK under data protection law. Nevertheless, this approach is now common practice for the vast majority of news sites in Europe and also in the EU, which has strict regulations regarding tracking, at least in theory. I still don’t know the legal details, but at least I know that there are no serious penalties whatsoever if there is no distortion of competition involved - and since none of the news companies would sue another in this matter, it has probably become common practice.
Can confirm this.
Time for 12ft.io I guess.
“To change all cookie settings click_here” <-- this is the bit you want. It’s free to reject all the cookies yourself.
Jokes on you, to remember your choice for no coockies they have to use a cookie.
Ublock origins -> select element -> remove
Or auto accept/refuse cookies with extension, then auto delete cookies for all but approved sites when closing browser.
I mean, Im not opposed to all cookies. Ones that I actually need like that one are fine. Just dont teack me kthxbye…
I still don’t care about Cookies + Cooking Auto-Delete is what I do. Do whatever the fuck is needed to get rid of the cookie banner and then delete all cookies when closing the tab.
I don’t even whitelist websites, I just don’t need cookies
Is a password manager, maybe with automatic login or at least autofill, part of your stack?
I don’t think I’ve ever had 63 tabs open on my browser. Well done.
Really? I regularly have well over 100, constant ♾️
Mad lad, hats off to you. If I have 6 or more open I start to feel uncomfortable.
I had 1600 open in Firefox until I decided enough is enough and closed all of them. These days I close every tab at the end of the day.
Hey, my phone has 12Gb of RAM for a reason, and bookmarks are scawy…
More rams than a shepard. Respect.
private session by default and using start page as your search engine with Anonymous View to search the pages saves the cookies but they are worthless one you leave the site
Okay, but that’s still a lot of effort, and loads more effort than 90% of users would be willing to go through. All so these fucks can (try to) sell my data to 19000 different ‘vendors’ and their ‘legitimate interests’. I swear this needs to be legally regulated somehow before we end up having to pay these people to not monitor our webcams while we read their shitty tabloids.
If you’re on Firefox, you can also have certain sites automatically open in containers. “Sure, put cookies on my machine if you want. You can see me only browsing your website ever.”
Well, you are subscribing to the Sun.
Its your own shitshow.
No one fucking cares.
What new level of hell is this?
the Sun would personally sell your organs if it could
It looks like the big buttons are “accept all” or “pay for no ads”, but the cookiescan still be tuned with the link under the “accept all”?
Hm yeah perhaps. I clicked away too fast to try it 😅
bypass paywalls clean?
Is this a question, a suggestion, or some kind of stroke? Do you need medical attention?
its an extension that can be added to FF/chrome. it “cleans” up the webpage so you don’t get the anti-ad-blocker/cookie crap on websites.
Just set up your browser to delete cookies on exit. If you want, just delete them from that site. The entire debate over whether-or-not a site sets a cookie seems to me to be pretty pointless. If a site can, then some bad actor will. No solution other than having your browser not retain them regardless of what a site wants to do is going to be a reliable solution. Not policies, not laws.
Paying doesn’t buy you anything unless they offer a no-log, no-data-mining policy. If you log in to use the site, then they can track you anyway via the credentials you use.
They’re not imposing it on you. They’re offering you a service that costs them money. They give you news, you give them money or data. If you don’t want to do that deal, there’s a whole Internet out there. Don’t go to that particular site. There are lots of websites out there, many of which offer the same deal. Getting upset that somewhere on the Internet, someone is offering a deal that you don’t want seems pointless.
Yeah, I guess that’s fair enough. Guess you can never fully trust these website owners anyway. That first part about clearing cookies on exit is definitely a good idea. But still, what has the internet come to…
I mean, do you expect news to be free?
Either pay for it by selling your data or with money, or don’t use their website.
And, though I don’t know about this one in particular, just because you pay not to have personalized ads, doesn’t mean you’re paying not to have your data tracked and sold by this company or to not have tracking cookies added to your browser by them that other sites can use to target ads to you.
It’s just that they won’t use the information they collect or buy or get from partners’ tracking cookies or advertising IDs already on your system to target the ads you see while on their site and logged in.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 1 month ago
OP, The Sun is one of the trashiest rags on the face of this Earth. Your best option regardless of their ad practices was always to stay well away from them.
ilikecoffee@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Oh I know, I clicked a link here on lemmy and was taken to that site. I never read it otherwise, but now Im definitely not reading it…
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Image
you can block websites if you want if you’re on voyager
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 month ago
And they’re not even the worst in the UK.
I forget which one it was that decried the Brass Eye paedophile special as sick, while on the page directly opposite it was an article telling you how big 15 year old Charlotte Church’s tits were getting along with a photo.
purrtastic@lemmy.nz 1 month ago
Daily Mail?
Brass Eye was incredible for shining a light on media and political hysteria. Their episode on drugs was hilarious and tragic.
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
They have a reputation in the UK for a reason, I don’t even want to start thinking what the us version is like