Very interesting. Lots of news websites are operating on a very similar principle, with the user having to either accept all cookies or pay for an expensive subscription that allows them to opt out of tracking cookies. I’ve always thought that this couldn’t possibly be legal.

Stop telling these companies. Send them a fine, and cease and desist. That’s is. They know, they don’t care. Just charge them until they comply

Too bad that i left its platforms due to it.

That said, i dont expect this to be their last exploit of user rights.

Its actually fairly fast reaction from EU considering they ok introduced their pay or ok model in November.

I dont believe that paying really was a viable option anyway, as they set the price so high but it could be interesting to see how many actually chose to pay!

I mean tracking exists because advertisers pay more for targeted ads, based on the tracking. I’d rather prefer it if the EU just made tracking illegal. Deal with the problem at its root.

Also maybe ban ads that track clicking on them (to then give a bigger payout). Advertisers should pay for simply showing me the ad and putting their brand/product in my brain.
And if we remove the option for targeted ads based on user tracking, the price for plain and simple old school ads might rise again, which is a very good thing for websites and users.

Until a court rules in favour of this no one will budge as this is just an opinion. I do hope it comes to that as since Spain ruled that charging for not planting cookies was a okay browsing news sites has been miserable.

Ha! Get rekt, Meta.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It followed requests by the Dutch, Norwegian, and Hamburg Data Protection Authorities and complaints about Meta, the social media company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

“Most users consent to the processing in order to use a service, and they do not understand the full implications of their choices,” EDPB chair Anu Talus said in a statement.

But a Meta spokesperson said: "Last year, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the subscriptions model is a legally valid way for companies to seek people’s consent for personalized advertising.

In November last year, privacy activist group noyb (None Of Your Business) filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority against Meta for introducing the subscription model.

At the time, Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb, said: "EU law requires that consent is the genuine free will of the user.

In February, consumer groups filed their own complaint to stop Meta giving EU users a “fake choice” between the subscription offer and consenting to being profiled and tracked via data collection.

The original article contains 556 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Serious question to Europeans: “How the hell did you get a group of people to actually give two fucks about you?” Seriously, here in the US even my goddamn local BOE is doing shady greedy shit. It’s all fucking corrupting so fast and without even a semblance of shame or privacy.

The EU is clueless. They think they are going to bypass the advertising model and that users are going to pay hundreds of dollars for all the services. They will continue to fall behind the US and China and they don’t have a plan. There is going to be backlash when news organization pull out just like Canada.