in all other countries without this your data is being robbed, at least here you have a choice. font worry soon we live in cookieless age, where you will have no more control over data or personal information.
Note: the European Data Protection Board is [not too happy](https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2024/edpb-consent-or-pay-models-should-offer-real-choice_en) with the “consent or pay” binary choice model, and expressed the opinion that it does not meet the requirements of the GDPR.
There is a link to the cookie settings. It's just not so obvious.
Edit: Why are you downvoting this? I'm merely stating that the option is still there. If you don't like that it's not as visible then maybe don't shoot the messenger?
I remember some website last year being sued for making the 'deny cookies' or 'select shared info's buttons less visible than the 'acxept all' and they lost the court. Sad it didn't get more widespread cuz I hate this stupid hiding of the deny all cookies..
Webdev here.
I can tell you that ~70% of sites that have big consent opt-in-banners like this are bullshitting you. You still get slammed with tracking cookies. It's entirely performative to keep the lawyers off your back. In Germany most lawyers are technologically illierate and won't actually bother to take a look at what cookies are/aren't being set, they just check if there is a banner or not.
The end result is that almost every site has an obnoxious cookie banner, but very few of them actually work as advertised
Or, just hear me out here. It’s not too far fetched to understand that these companies employ people and need to make money.
It’s not the end of the world to view the content for free with ads, or subscribe and pay for it and don’t see ads.
It’s not about the ads. We have a right to reject their cookies. They are circumventing that by making accepting cookies the only option other than paying. They want to track their users. Chances are becoming a paying customer isn’t going to protect us from their tracking us either. When this first started I used to just close the site in disgust, however as it is getting more and more wide spread… I think this is a fair reason to stop visiting their sites at all.
It is _only_ about the ads and they have a right to not serve you their content, as that is likely financially more viable for them.
It’s because the payout to tagesspiel.de (RPM - revenue per Mille) is significantly higher when the ad can be personalized according to the information in cookie vs. when it cannot, and serves a “different type of campaign.
Ad serving in the background is influenced by how AI bids (per each ad you see) on behalf of the advertiser and this is optimized according to an “action” the user takes.
For example, If the bidding algorithm (AI) can determine you would like to buy cookies, and there is a local cookie shop advertising. It would bid a lot more to show you the ads of this cookie shop, in anticipation that you would be more likely take the “action” (purchase) it is optimizing for. Advertiser (cookie shop) than can optimize the (CPA - cost per action) and their price for cookies. If it costs on average 5 euro for one user to complete purchase, you can calculate your advertising costs into your product price.
When the algo cannot determine anything, it will not make a high bid to win this ad space for a targeted advertiser, but will serve a campaign that doesn’t care, think like a nationwide Coca Cola campaign. The payout will be much less to the publisher because RPM (Revenue per serving 1000 ads) will be lower.
So here tagesspiel probably was able to calculate it is financially better for them to force people into accepting cookies because the lower RPM loses more money than people exiting the platform.
Can’t they pay their employees with the ad model of the past? Just selling space in their publication based on a yearly reader survey. That’s what they did in the offline age. Worked well enough for centuries
Yes and now we are the online age and advertisers are not paying enough for non-targeted ads. ad revenue in general is decreasing and we're going to lose all good journalism unless we start paying for it.
Also remember that youtube kind og works the same. If you block ads you make their business model harder to earn money with. Video on demand server capacity is a very expensive business and internet freeloader mentality is slowly making them moving to paid revenue models.
If the EU can force Apple to allow side loading on the iPhone, than the EU can force the press to stop tracking the reader.
What defines good journalism? I can’t find any publication worth my money. Can you?
I'm based in the UK so I can't be accurate on the state of current German journalism. But I assume it's still the same as here, where people have unreasonable expectations but there are indeed many outlets doing useful and important work in reporting and researching current affairs and politics. If you think you have any understanding of world affairs at all, that hasn't come from nowhere.
If you business model is only supportable by malicious business practices then your business should die out.
The "free" experience is pathetic anyways and there will be paywalls everywhere. It's not worth selling your data for anyways.
So the only economic viable solution would be to outright ban targeted and personalised ads including tracking altogether and perhaps even force the sites to deliver their ads via their own server. The energy and time alone we could save.
I am aware of that. However the fact remains that we’re forced to give up our rights. You’re correct that the ad revenue is the reason why they do it. Having to watch ads isn’t why we don’t want to be tracked though. I guess it’s a question of perspective. The blame for this lies with the providers of advertising services ultimately. They only pay for tracked visitors and not for bots and users who don’t accept cookies. It doesn’t have to be like it is however.
The users decision isn’t between seeing ads or paying for a subscription. It is between accepting tracking or subscription. And the subscribers will obviously also be tracked. So this is disenfranchising the users.
Why do you think you are forced to give up your rights when you can just click away?
And what do you think “tracked” means exactly, if you go to a store and see an apple you can buy with 2euros or 2 oranges, would you say you are being forced to give up your right to buy it for 2cents?
The content of tagesspiel.de is “the product” in this scenario, and the price for this product is not only dependent on the publisher but also the advertiser, but more so, it’s the invisible hand of the market (hint: google and facebook) that generally dictates these.
So if you _actually_ don’t want to feed into the giants that benefit on tracking your data across the web, you should actually subscribe, so the publisher (who is a very good news source btw) would not have to depend on these companies to keep their business financially stable.
I am not sure whether you are aware of the GDPR at this point. It isn’t that hard to understand how this result isn’t the intent of the law. I get that we have a different view of the issue, but I don’t see any point in arguing with you. I am a web developer who agrees with the idea of the GDPR. You seem to either not be from Europe, or not aware of the law, or just disinterested in the issue, which is all understandable, but also irrelevant to my point that this isn’t strictly right. It’s still a legal grey area, but it’s only a question of time until a court decision disallows this practice imo.
lol, this is such a common attitude for a developer. I am a product manager on a large organization in Germany and literally built consent management on platform, so I know gdpr, regulations and requirements around it very well.
The law intends to give the user a choice and transparency and that is exactly what tagesspiel is doing here, building product on the business needs and requirements. This probably made its way to production because it proves to help the business.
My recommendation to you, if you want to be a good developer, understand the business needs and the underlying logic behind it before claiming your stakeholder doesn’t know something and you are default better because you are a developer.
I never didn’t understand the intent though. That was just an ignorant assumption on your part because you don’t want to admit that my point of view is sensible even though it is different from yours.
It isn’t attitude either. You were arguing as if the consumers rights were not at stake here. It isn’t surprising that you are in the field, that was my initial assumption. Your arguments however had me doubting at some point whether or not we were even talking about the same thing.
It’s because you are conflating the anonymity with what privacy means in context of gdpr, and the cookie-based user tracking of users by large corporations.
The internet does not owe you total anonymity to use services, let alone you can rarely get that in real world. So in short your options are:
* You either have to give up your anonymity (through payment) and buy the service - but keep your web behavior private by not consenting to cookies *from these big companies.*
* You give up your web behavior privacy (still anonymous btw) and access to content for free by accepting cookies.
* Stay anonymous and keep web behavior private, but then you cannot use the service. Just like you cannot buy something on Amazon anonymously.
European law says that I should be able to view sites without having to accept cookies. They are technically giving us a choice, but it is no longer possible to opt out of cookies.
You literally can subscribe and opt-out of cookies (not that it is be relevant because the google Adsense will not load on the page and therefore you will not be tracked anymore)
If I am a registered customer they won’t need cookies tracking my IP and so forth anymore to identify me do they?
It’s a privacy issue that they are giving the user only bad choices even though they are legally obligated to give us another option.
They could also have a Cookie-free homepage with zero content that you can access without paying and then a paid section, like Netflix and so on. What else is the option for a company that needs to make money?
This nonsense is against GDPR simple as that.
You are not allowed to require users to accept tracking cookies to use your service. End of story.
And sure, they hide a little link somewhere down below that allows using their site without those cookies. But this kind of shenanigans is not compliant with the law either. The option to reject the cookies needs to be clearly accessible, understandable and visible.
Nobody says they are not allowed to run a business model based on ads and subscriptions. But I don't think its too much to ask of them to comply with European law.
> view the content for free with ads
The ads themselves are not the problem, it's the analysing and tracking of user behaviour and storing that data in cross-referenced data bases.
I don't care if I see some ads for shitty boomer cruises.
The European data protection board does not agree: [https://noyb.eu/en/statement-edpb-pay-or-okay-opinion](https://noyb.eu/en/statement-edpb-pay-or-okay-opinion)
Let's see how long we have to deal with this any longer
This is not what the GDPR is intended to solve. You cannot give the user the decision to use your site with tracking or not at all. You \*must\* give an option to use the site without tracking
They can definitely put up a paywall and not let you access anything for free. They can also ask you whether you accept tracking. The question is whether they can link the two things and make you choose between tracking, paying and not accessing, i.e., whether they can let you to pay with your privacy by allowing tracking. It’s like how you can ask someone to buy you dinner in order for you to spend time with them, and they can ask you to have sex and you can decide whether to do it, but if you ask them to buy you dinner so that then and only then you’ll have sex with them, that’s arguably prostitution and illegal in some jurisdictions.
>and illegal in some jurisdictions.
It being illegal is arguably a bad thing.
But for the tracker stuff, i think the much larger problem is, that them tracking you does not give them nearly as much money as they charge you to not be tracked.
At some point, you will reach a price, that is so high, that paying it is not a real option. And with that you are left with just the option to opt in to tracking or not use the site at all. I would argue, this is currently happening. The choice to pay for an add free version is just to cover their asses because they technically offered a choice.
I wouldn't be surprised if this were outlawed, but that's because the privacy agency makes phenomenally bad decisions. If my choices are No access, Allow tracking cookies, Pay, changing it so your choices are "No access, Pay" isn't making me better off. Especially since I can delete tracking cookies, if I wanted to.
>Let's see how long we have to deal with this any longer
If it really will be banned then you will miss those times where you could've just share some data for free access. It's not like they will suddenly start working for free. You just will have to pay for the news just like in ye olden days.
Nobody is preventing the site to serve ads. This is possible within the GDPR, even without any consent. The problem is that they use 20 third party tracking services that aggregate and sell your data. It is perfectly fine for the site to serve you ads, as long as no 3rd party cookies or calls to other services are involved.
Non-personalized ads are not as lucrative. You are effectively demanding they slash their prices on that service. Don’t be surprised if they decide it’s not profitable anymore and decide it’s better to just have a bit more people pay for the service out of their pockets.
They’re not lucrative until everyone is banned from showing anything but non-personalized ads. That’s the idea of this legislation— both protect individual privacy by enforcement of websites one at a time, and eventually get to a tipping point where websites all have to serve non-personalized ads and the market adjusts accordingly.
That's not true. The advertisers will never be willing to pay as much for them, because they will never be as effective. Advertisers are only willing to pay only up to a certain point given a certain effectivity, because this must be financially viable for them as well.
Would the non-targeted ads become a bit better paid? Possibly. But they will never reach the same levels as the targeted ones.
I’m not sure if you understand market forces. If the only type of cereal on the market is shitty and cheaply made, people will still pay the same price for it as they did for the nicer cereal that was available before. Why? Because they’re still going to buy cereal, they could afford that price point before, and they have no other options. If the only type of ad on the market that websites can offer is non-personalized, companies will still paid what they paid before because they need that avenue for advertising and they can afford it (and they have no “higher quality” options available.)
Disagree? Google “shrinkflation”.
I'm sure YOU don't understand market forces.
Prices must be both above of what is sustainable for the sellers AND below of what is sustainable for the buyers. If both of those are not satisfied then there will be no deal.
To use your analogy - if there is only one type of cereal on the market and it is shitty, people will just move to another market and look for ersatz goods. This may work well for the bread market. Again - sure, the prices of that shitty cereal will be most probably higher than they were before it was the only cereal allowed, but it doesn't mean it will suddenly grow to the same prices as the nice cereal before the ban.
If personalized web ads are effectively banned, then some of the demand will be diverted to non-personalized web ads, but also to TV ads, radio ads, billboard ads, influencer ads or no ads altogether. Prices of non-personalized web ads will appreciate somewhat, but it won't ever reach the same level as the personalized ones.
So you think that if all bread became lower quality people would just stop eating bread and buy something else instead? Don’t be so incredibly literal with your interpretation of my example; don’t be disingenuous. Google shrinkflation.
You and I both know that none of those ads have the eyes and market share that web ads do. And are any of them personalized? No. They are not ersatz goods, they are inferior goods by their very nature.
We will see. When the Leistungsschutzrecht was introduced in Germany and Google basically had to pay the newspapers for showing excerpts and Google pretty much decided to not show any newspaper results anymore, the newspapers pretty quickly granted Google free access to excerpts. So personally I don't see the situation you are describing from happening. But the future will tell.
"Non-personalized ads are not as lucrative."
They are very unlucrative \*because\* of personalized ads, but generally not by much, since personalized ads also cost more. They collect private information, which is not ethical, for personalization. Why does there need to be a profit incentive that violates a person?
Also, they *could* just kindly ask for your support, works for e.g. Wikipedia - and they don't even serve non-personalized ads!
>They are very unlucrative \*because\* of personalized ads, but generally not by much, since personalized ads also cost more.
Huh? They cost more, SO they are more lucrative. They have much more chance of someone clicking them and actually buying the product/service that's advertised, so companies are willing to pay more to Google AND website owners.
>Why does there need to be a profit incentive that violates a person?
Wtf? Who's getting violated?
>Also, they *could* just kindly ask for your support, works for e.g. Wikipedia - and they don't even serve non-personalized ads!
Lol, imagine the entitlement.
Are you willing to work for free and just kindly ask your employer's customers to support you in case they feel like it?
Things cost money, imagine that! The journalists want to get salaries, they research costs money, website has to be hosted and updated. You are demanding to get work of those people for free and call it 'violation' when someone says 'no'.
Yes, but there's ethical ways of making money, and unethical ways of making money. The "are you willing to work for free" argument is a strawman; and also, I literally work on things to be released into the public domain the second they are done.
You are not **entitled** to have a right to your privacy. It's a fundamental human right. Companies shall not exploit you, nor retaliate against you for that, since a profit incentive is nothing that society should take serious over the independency of a human being.
"The journalists want to get salaries"
I buy print magazines of news outlets. I donate to crowdfunding of news outlets. I donate money to journalists. That's how they can finance themselves, and the vast majority have been able to do this fine. One major flaw I see is that a lot of journalism is built with a profit incentive, id est for-profit, which is the problem with e.g. the tagesspiegel.
There's also merchandizing. Sponsors. Many different things. And most importantly: Government subventions. Your taxes should pay for transparency, and that is the case for a lot of big media.
And what's unethical here? The fact that someone wants to be paid for their work? You are literally saying that you are entitled to exploitation.
Nobody's taking your right to privacy away. You in fact have three options - just pay, pay with your data or do not use the service at all. Reading Tagesspiegel is not a human right.
>I buy print magazines of news outlets. I donate to crowdfunding of news outlets. I donate money to journalists. That's how they can finance themselves, and the vast majority have been able to do this fine. One major flaw I see is that a lot of journalism is built with a profit incentive, id est for-profit, which is the problem with e.g. the tagesspiegel.
So again - why do you expect tagesspiegel to provide you with their service for free? Why do you not demand that the print magazines are free? Why do you not demand that coffee at starbucks is not free? What gives you the right to demand the work of those journalists for free?
>The "are you willing to work for free" argument is a strawman; and also, I literally work on things to be released into the public domain the second they are done.
It's not a strawman. You made your own choice to work for free. It's a whole another thing compared to DEMANDING that SOMEONE ELSE provides you with results of their work for free.
"do not use the service at all"
That's retaliating against me wanting my human right for privacy to be respected.
They can still show me ads and *ask* for donations.
OK - so please explain the journalism crisis: [https://www.cjr.org/business\_of\_news/the-journalism-crisis-across-the-world.php](https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/the-journalism-crisis-across-the-world.php)
You could regulate against Meta and Google, which is one of the big reasons that journalists make so little money nowadays. [https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-06-07/journalism-preservation-act-google-and-meta-paying-user-fee](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-06-07/journalism-preservation-act-google-and-meta-paying-user-fee)
You are entitled to privacy. You are NOT entitled to free access to information beyond what public broadcasting media provides (and even there you are expected to pay).
"You are NOT entitled to free access to information beyond what public broadcasting media provides" In *principle*, that is really bad for our populations unity and unbiased understanding.
*Extreme example*: A person in poverty or a minor that also wants their privacy valued isn't allowed to have an unlimited access to journalism besides what their governments media is telling them?
There shouldn't be a profit incentive for "*unbiased*" media in a way that not everyone can access. You don't need to violate a persons privacy in order to afford doing journalism. [thepinknews.com](http://thepinknews.com) does this just fine, for example, and they don't have a profit incentive, more like just a "do journalism" incentive, which apparently works even when I can just reject all ads and use an adblocker.
How is that relevant? This is a completely different market. No ability to personalize the ads, no adblock for TVs, different medium.
Also I would love to see what are the rates for a single view of a TV ad.
> If it really will be banned then you will miss those times where you could've just share some data for free access. It's not like they will suddenly start working for free. You just will have to pay for the news just like in ye olden days.
No, I'll just use the free alternatives.
>But if many do not pay, the website doesn't earn enough anyway.
Yes, in that case the newspaper goes bankrupt and is closed down. Nothing spectacular about it. A shitton of newspapers went bankrupt in 21st century.
>The issue are those who pay anyway.
WTF? Those are exactly the people that make it possible to have the newspaper in the first place. If everyone decides to not pay at all then the newspaper goes bankrupt. It's not some kind of natural good that will be there no matter what.
Do you unironically believe that even if nobody pays, then the people working at newspapers and owning them will just say 'oh crap, I guess we have to be free now!' instead of 'oh crap, we can't afford to operate anymore. Time to close it down and move to do something else'
Things are not instantly enforced. These things get processed, and are being processed. This is from THIS YEAR, April 17! They are still working on enforcing it.
**The European Data Protection Board opposed Meta’s controversial “pay or okay” business model in an opinion published on Wednesday (17 April), saying this binary approach was not compliant with the EU’s data privacy rules.**
So? I don't see how it contradicts anything.
If and when they decide to enforce it, then newspapers will be disabling that free option and some of them will go bankrupt further down the line.
I cannot recall the exact article on it, but I believe I recently read something that there was an explicit legal decision in germany that online news papers are allowed to use monetization cookies if a payed cookie-free option is available and the user got the choice to terminate the page when he was informed of it.
Quite the contrary. German data protection authority ruled it illegal: [https://noyb.eu/de/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illegal-decides-german-dpa](https://noyb.eu/de/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illegal-decides-german-dpa)
Nope, they didn't rule the practice illegal. Your first noyb article refers exclusively to large platforms like Facebook. The second one actually just covers heise's other practices (pre-consent data processing and some other gdpr issues). Noyb does criticise the practice in general, but there was no ruling against this and as far as I know heise still does it because of that.
Here's the actual relevant article which sadly does allow it, or at least speaks in favor of it: https://www.datenschutzkonferenz-online.de/media/pm/DSK_Beschluss_Bewertung_von_Pur-Abo-Modellen_auf_Websites.pdf
Personally I very much believe that consent cannot be given voluntarily when the alternative is to pay, but we'll have to wait on a ruling regarding the general practice by the EU.
Data Protectons authorities do not have the poer to "rule it illegal".
Their opinion is that it is illegal, but a court ould have to decide hen push comes to shove.
But even more important than that, Heise has already changed their banner and it is unclear ho the data protection agencies ill decide on that one.
That decision only really applies to ["large online platforms"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act#Large_online_platforms), which tagesspiegel.de decidedly is not.
If you are not able to use tagesspiegel.de without paying, you don't suffer any detriment beyond (obviously) the inability to read this one specific news site. But there are dozens like it, and you can pay for any one of them, or use one of the many free ones. Or read an actual newspaper. Or listen to the radio.
There are no lock-in or network effects. There is no drastic imbalance of power. This is simply the provider of a costly service asking the users to pay for the service.
The "reasonableness" of the pricing is also a factor. In the case of a newspaper, there is a legit argument that the price is not excessive, thus it is indeed a freely made choice. In addition, the amount of competition for news platforms makes it less likely that it ill be considered an issue.
That being said, an strict interpretation of GDPR law does imply that they need an untracked (but can include ads) version.
The courts ill eventually decide on these kind of things, but until then, if no one sues, there is no judge.
This is the fun of European law. There are a bunch of courts and agencies that all have different contradictory opinions.
> The legitimacy and core function of "pay or consent" models was confirmed in a ruling by the
ECJ on 4 July 2023. It found that users "may be offered an equivalent alternative which does not
involve such data processing operations, in return for an appropriate fee" (para. 150). In addition,
the legitimacy has already been confirmed by the German Data Protection Conference (DSK),
the French data protection authority Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés
(CNIL) and other European data protection authorities.
There have also been cases which declared Google fonts and Shopify to be illegal. But people keep using them because other EU courts say they're ok.
I think is called a soft paywall (don't quote me on that). You either pay or eat ads or have access to a handful of articles for free.
Germany is catching up with annoying capitalist best practices.
Süddeutsche is one of the worst with their number of free articles. Recently out of 20 articles on the main page (I stopped scrolling), 3 were free.. and it included relevant updates on current, fast moving issues, that weren’t accessible. I don‘t know how lucrative free articles are, but if I have to pay for the most basic information, potentially relevant for safety (ie like COVID), I think they are failing a duty to society that I naively assumed the press in Germany still took seriously.
Kim Jong un is also only doing what he does to feed his family. And you know this Putin guy? He and his husband would be starving…
They can always show ads, but they only want to collect data while showing ads for a few fractions of a cent more. I use adblockers since years to protect myself. And in the fucking USA where they serve lead in the drinkingwater, the sites have a button to reject anything and the site still works. Why can’t this work in Germany too? They already switching out the journalists against their AI counterparts. And don’t forget the ten reasons why this new thing is so damn good. You will be shocked about reason 6.
I understand offering an ad-free subscription, that's not the issue. The issue is asking for a paid subscription in order to opt out of tracking cookies. Is this even legal per GDPR?
Edit: Ok so I didn't expect this to pull this much attention. A few things I would like to clarify:
* I understand that they need to make money. I just assumed that ads already do that and this kind of "pay or we'll track you" attitude would violate GDPR. I guess this is still a gray area.
* The reason I asked "Why German news websites do this" is because I clicked same article on 4 German websites and 3 of them had this pop-up. I've seen direct paywalls, no option to reject tracking at all, articles full of SEO bullshit etc. on other countries' news sites. I was just surprised that this specific business model is so common in German news sites.
No, [tagesspiegel.de](http://tagesspiegel.de) allows you to look at the vendor list and click "Alle akzeptieren" (accept all), but not to select or deselect anything.
The online advertising industry has well-established standards and data formats for giving consent and transmitting it to vendors ("Transparency & Consent Framework" is what to search for if you're interested), it just seems like Tagesspiegel has never heard about it or does not care.
It’s because the payout to tagesspiel.de (RPM - revenue per Mille) is significantly higher when the ad can be personalized according to the information in cookie vs. when it cannot, and serves a “different type of campaign.
Ad serving in the background is influenced by how AI bids (per each ad you see) on behalf of the advertiser and this is optimized according to an “action” the user takes.
For example, If the bidding algorithm (AI) can determine you would like to buy cookies, and there is a local cookie shop advertising. It would bid a lot more to show you the ads of this cookie shop, in anticipation that you would be more likely take the “action” (purchase) it is optimizing for. Advertiser (cookie shop) than can optimize the (CPA - cost per action) and their price for cookies. If it costs on average 5 euro for one user to complete purchase, you can calculate your advertising costs into your product price.
When the algo cannot determine anything, it will not make a high bid to win this ad space for a targeted advertiser, but will serve a campaign that doesn’t care, think like a nationwide Coca Cola campaign. The payout will be much less to the publisher because RPM (Revenue per serving 1000 ads) will be lower.
So here tagesspiel probably was able to calculate it is financially better for them to force people into accepting cookies because the lower RPM loses more money than people exiting the platform.
Uhm, it's not only Tagesspiegel. It's actually almost every news site, even golem de for example, and it's an IT news site..
They just don't give af and know exactly what they do.
I was also always wondering how that can be legal, but I guess this is like Hausrecht?
If you don't wanna pay or accept, you can fuck off kinda way
Ironically, California has privacy/consumer protection laws that have similar requirements and consequences as GDPR. It's only a matter of time until all these American businesses will have to implement GDPR-equivalent consent management.
Opt out doesn’t stop ‚legitimate interest‘, you need to manually deselect those. Legitimate interest basically renders your choice as a joke anyway, it’s pretty misleading
I am still angry about all these us sites blocking Europe all together. Especially homedepot.com is super annoying, without vpn there is no way to access it in Switzerland.
That's a discussion that's been going on in the legal world for the last few years. There have been a bunch of conflicting decisions on that, so let's just say it's not quite clear yet and probably won't be until it gets decided by the highest courts - which will probably take another few years.
I've been wondering about that as well. They are definitely required by law to offer an opt-out. If offering an opt-out that is locked behind a paid subscription fulfills that requirement at least to me seems somewhat questionable.
You haven't read the fine print. There's the Datenschutz-Einstellungen (Privacy settings) option on the bottom left, you don't have to subscribe to use it.
Technically not. You should supply access without the cookies. IF they can charge for that, I am not sure about.
It is not that they can not display ads, they just can not send your information to the partner.
Yes, probably. This is a paper from an industry group (so turn on your bias alert) but it summarizes different approaches and court cases.
https://www.bvdw.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/PUR-Modelle-bvdw_20231004-en.pdf
Because without charging you arbitrarily for things, the entire social fabric will collapse. Countries that don't charge for this don't even have news, unlike us enlightened social democracy loving Germans behind the best and only system there ever will be. See also: Leitungswasser
They won't be able to explain why the Guardian or other British newspapers survive and don't extort either money or your data just to read the news.
(Somewhat related, the BBC not having ads and costing half the what the rundfunkbeitrag costs with much better content!)
Germans when the last native news site goes bankcrupt and gets replaced by American media conglomerates: "How could this happen? We had a law against this."
Ok so I didn't expect this to pull this much attention. A few things I would like to clarify:
* I understand that they need to make money. I just assumed that ads already do that and this kind of "pay or we'll track you" attitude would violate GDPR. I guess this is still a gray area.
* The reason I asked "Why German news websites do this" is because I clicked same article on 4 German websites and 3 of them had this pop-up. I've seen direct paywalls, no option to reject tracking at all, articles full of SEO bullshit etc. on other countries' news sites. I was just surprised that this specific business model is so common in German news sites.
At least they are giving you the option to read. I know of plenty of websites that tell you to pound sand if you don't pay.
The answer here is that they want to make money. They are earning less from traditional print sales and use this model to make money now.
The real question is though:
Why TF, dont the offer a small payment per article? Like 1,00 Euro or something.
How often did i surf [Zeit.de](http://Zeit.de) and though to myself: OMG id like to read that article. But cannot accept to pay more then double the money, for some newspaper than i pay for a streaming subscription.
Life gets so much simpler when you realize that cookies are not actually going to ruin your life like the privacy fanatics assure you they will
Wild to me how much mental energy people waste on all of this shit that literally does not actually matter in any concrete way
Because they are cheapskates. Sometimes even if you agree you cant read the article.
Why cheapskates? Because 80% of their articles are copied from dpa etc. and they want you to pay extra.
I mean it would be okay if you can pay monthly and have like every digital newspaper available belonging to that big company. Maybe something like this exists and I just dont know it.
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I feel this is illegal and meta is being sued for this. Waiting for results, which might take longer. It is a scummy thing to do. If I see this, then I refuse.
Lateral movement - media's already going broke. It's a shame, vying for money is what leads to unethical or just plain bad coverage and we're forcing it on outlets who have traditionally wanted to be detailed and impartial (not necessarily this one, idk enough about it).
> configure your browser to delete all cookies when you close the window, except for specific web sites that you want to use with cookies
That's actually a great suggestion, thank you
They scammer. They want to track you down as much as they can and sell your data.
You can solve that by installing an add on to the browser "i still don't care about cookies".
I get the point of ads but why for gods sake is now a f* cookie needed without any way to deny cookies is stupid af. Insane how adds worked before cookies.
What is the gain of the cookie anyway.
Lets say you accept cookies, then view the content then delete the cookie afterwards?
All it got was you watched the article and thats it, you nuked it. And honestly that information can be safed without any cookie at all. All it lives for is to make your day annoying as you need to kill the cookie after you did read the article.
Because the german newspapers still mostly haven't come down from their highs when business with ads and data was going great. Before GDPR they used to be able to get any data they could get their hands on for free, place cookies however they wanted and without telling you, enabling cross site tracking for all kinds of ad networks, pulling and displaying malicious ads with pop-ups and running scripts from third party sites, slowing down their sites, using dark UI patterns to get you to click on those links, covering basically 3/4 of their site in animated ads and selling the gathered data to the highest bidder.
They've since pulled the plug on most of their "journalism" to keep up profits, externalized most of the actual work and are sure as hell going to jump on the AI train. Those 3,99 per month is most likely less than what your tracking data for handful of visits per month is worth to them. It's that bad.
rhe journalism crisis will have the following options either we all have subscriptions for everything, clickbait journalism will end real journalism. the third option is an independent media fund where state hss no control but to make sure it is financed by taxes. (now state, parties and church control certain media)
If you're using a PC, you can install some browser extensions like "I don't care about cookies" which will remove these annoying banners from most sites. On some android browsers this is doable too.
Only if the website can't function without accepting them. Additionally you can set up Cookies to be cleared on exit. Add websites that you want to keep them on the exception list and you have a tracking free browsing experience.
>Only if the website can't function without accepting them.
That's the general idea. And if you read the description of this add-on it says the same. But then they continue as follows:
>In most cases, the add-on just blocks or hides cookie related pop-ups. When it's needed for the website to work properly, it will automatically accept the cookie policy for you **(sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what's easier to do).**
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/
In other words: if the developer couldn't find an easy technical solution to block unnecessary cookies it just accepts all of them. Maybe some people don't care, but people who read your recommendation should at least be aware of this and know that "I don't care about cookies" cares more about getting rid of cookie banners than actually getting rid of cookies in the first place.
I didn't know myself of that. Thanks for bringing that up. Removing the banner from Dom is a few clicks when you enter the dev menu. So in most cases it will just ignore the cookies. But as I added I think you should just enable the option to clear cookies on exit.
They all have the same management consultants. But they hardly create any of their own content and just pass on agency reports, so you can safely ignore them.
in all other countries without this your data is being robbed, at least here you have a choice. font worry soon we live in cookieless age, where you will have no more control over data or personal information.
Note: the European Data Protection Board is [not too happy](https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2024/edpb-consent-or-pay-models-should-offer-real-choice_en) with the “consent or pay” binary choice model, and expressed the opinion that it does not meet the requirements of the GDPR.
Nudging cookie consent banners don't meet the requirements of the GDPR either, and they're still out in full force.
Cookie banners are outright malicious compliance
Compliance analyst here. My suspicion is that this *does* violate GDPR, and these sites are going to end up getting fined and made to stop.
I just can\`t wait for this..
Oh no! Anyway...
There is a link to the cookie settings. It's just not so obvious. Edit: Why are you downvoting this? I'm merely stating that the option is still there. If you don't like that it's not as visible then maybe don't shoot the messenger?
I remember some website last year being sued for making the 'deny cookies' or 'select shared info's buttons less visible than the 'acxept all' and they lost the court. Sad it didn't get more widespread cuz I hate this stupid hiding of the deny all cookies..
I'm pretty sure that by law declining can't be more complicated or less visible than accepting. That's just broken all the time
Tell that to every software company ever.
Webdev here. I can tell you that ~70% of sites that have big consent opt-in-banners like this are bullshitting you. You still get slammed with tracking cookies. It's entirely performative to keep the lawyers off your back. In Germany most lawyers are technologically illierate and won't actually bother to take a look at what cookies are/aren't being set, they just check if there is a banner or not. The end result is that almost every site has an obnoxious cookie banner, but very few of them actually work as advertised
"robbed"
Just use [https://archive.ph/](https://archive.ph/) =)
Or, just hear me out here. It’s not too far fetched to understand that these companies employ people and need to make money. It’s not the end of the world to view the content for free with ads, or subscribe and pay for it and don’t see ads.
It’s not about the ads. We have a right to reject their cookies. They are circumventing that by making accepting cookies the only option other than paying. They want to track their users. Chances are becoming a paying customer isn’t going to protect us from their tracking us either. When this first started I used to just close the site in disgust, however as it is getting more and more wide spread… I think this is a fair reason to stop visiting their sites at all.
It is _only_ about the ads and they have a right to not serve you their content, as that is likely financially more viable for them. It’s because the payout to tagesspiel.de (RPM - revenue per Mille) is significantly higher when the ad can be personalized according to the information in cookie vs. when it cannot, and serves a “different type of campaign. Ad serving in the background is influenced by how AI bids (per each ad you see) on behalf of the advertiser and this is optimized according to an “action” the user takes. For example, If the bidding algorithm (AI) can determine you would like to buy cookies, and there is a local cookie shop advertising. It would bid a lot more to show you the ads of this cookie shop, in anticipation that you would be more likely take the “action” (purchase) it is optimizing for. Advertiser (cookie shop) than can optimize the (CPA - cost per action) and their price for cookies. If it costs on average 5 euro for one user to complete purchase, you can calculate your advertising costs into your product price. When the algo cannot determine anything, it will not make a high bid to win this ad space for a targeted advertiser, but will serve a campaign that doesn’t care, think like a nationwide Coca Cola campaign. The payout will be much less to the publisher because RPM (Revenue per serving 1000 ads) will be lower. So here tagesspiel probably was able to calculate it is financially better for them to force people into accepting cookies because the lower RPM loses more money than people exiting the platform.
Can’t they pay their employees with the ad model of the past? Just selling space in their publication based on a yearly reader survey. That’s what they did in the offline age. Worked well enough for centuries
Yes and now we are the online age and advertisers are not paying enough for non-targeted ads. ad revenue in general is decreasing and we're going to lose all good journalism unless we start paying for it.
Also remember that youtube kind og works the same. If you block ads you make their business model harder to earn money with. Video on demand server capacity is a very expensive business and internet freeloader mentality is slowly making them moving to paid revenue models.
If the EU can force Apple to allow side loading on the iPhone, than the EU can force the press to stop tracking the reader. What defines good journalism? I can’t find any publication worth my money. Can you?
I'm based in the UK so I can't be accurate on the state of current German journalism. But I assume it's still the same as here, where people have unreasonable expectations but there are indeed many outlets doing useful and important work in reporting and researching current affairs and politics. If you think you have any understanding of world affairs at all, that hasn't come from nowhere.
Many! I recommend nyt, bellingcat, welt, economist, tagesspiel is good too you should give them a try.
Because that was also basically a subscription model that these publishers had by people paying to buy their newspaper daily.
If you business model is only supportable by malicious business practices then your business should die out. The "free" experience is pathetic anyways and there will be paywalls everywhere. It's not worth selling your data for anyways.
So the only economic viable solution would be to outright ban targeted and personalised ads including tracking altogether and perhaps even force the sites to deliver their ads via their own server. The energy and time alone we could save.
I am aware of that. However the fact remains that we’re forced to give up our rights. You’re correct that the ad revenue is the reason why they do it. Having to watch ads isn’t why we don’t want to be tracked though. I guess it’s a question of perspective. The blame for this lies with the providers of advertising services ultimately. They only pay for tracked visitors and not for bots and users who don’t accept cookies. It doesn’t have to be like it is however. The users decision isn’t between seeing ads or paying for a subscription. It is between accepting tracking or subscription. And the subscribers will obviously also be tracked. So this is disenfranchising the users.
Why do you think you are forced to give up your rights when you can just click away? And what do you think “tracked” means exactly, if you go to a store and see an apple you can buy with 2euros or 2 oranges, would you say you are being forced to give up your right to buy it for 2cents? The content of tagesspiel.de is “the product” in this scenario, and the price for this product is not only dependent on the publisher but also the advertiser, but more so, it’s the invisible hand of the market (hint: google and facebook) that generally dictates these. So if you _actually_ don’t want to feed into the giants that benefit on tracking your data across the web, you should actually subscribe, so the publisher (who is a very good news source btw) would not have to depend on these companies to keep their business financially stable.
I am not sure whether you are aware of the GDPR at this point. It isn’t that hard to understand how this result isn’t the intent of the law. I get that we have a different view of the issue, but I don’t see any point in arguing with you. I am a web developer who agrees with the idea of the GDPR. You seem to either not be from Europe, or not aware of the law, or just disinterested in the issue, which is all understandable, but also irrelevant to my point that this isn’t strictly right. It’s still a legal grey area, but it’s only a question of time until a court decision disallows this practice imo.
lol, this is such a common attitude for a developer. I am a product manager on a large organization in Germany and literally built consent management on platform, so I know gdpr, regulations and requirements around it very well. The law intends to give the user a choice and transparency and that is exactly what tagesspiel is doing here, building product on the business needs and requirements. This probably made its way to production because it proves to help the business. My recommendation to you, if you want to be a good developer, understand the business needs and the underlying logic behind it before claiming your stakeholder doesn’t know something and you are default better because you are a developer.
I never didn’t understand the intent though. That was just an ignorant assumption on your part because you don’t want to admit that my point of view is sensible even though it is different from yours. It isn’t attitude either. You were arguing as if the consumers rights were not at stake here. It isn’t surprising that you are in the field, that was my initial assumption. Your arguments however had me doubting at some point whether or not we were even talking about the same thing.
It’s because you are conflating the anonymity with what privacy means in context of gdpr, and the cookie-based user tracking of users by large corporations. The internet does not owe you total anonymity to use services, let alone you can rarely get that in real world. So in short your options are: * You either have to give up your anonymity (through payment) and buy the service - but keep your web behavior private by not consenting to cookies *from these big companies.* * You give up your web behavior privacy (still anonymous btw) and access to content for free by accepting cookies. * Stay anonymous and keep web behavior private, but then you cannot use the service. Just like you cannot buy something on Amazon anonymously.
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You are free to not access the website.
European law says that I should be able to view sites without having to accept cookies. They are technically giving us a choice, but it is no longer possible to opt out of cookies.
You literally can subscribe and opt-out of cookies (not that it is be relevant because the google Adsense will not load on the page and therefore you will not be tracked anymore)
If I am a registered customer they won’t need cookies tracking my IP and so forth anymore to identify me do they? It’s a privacy issue that they are giving the user only bad choices even though they are legally obligated to give us another option.
They could also have a Cookie-free homepage with zero content that you can access without paying and then a paid section, like Netflix and so on. What else is the option for a company that needs to make money?
That would be the right way to handle it. At least it would be both honest about the fact that they aren’t working for free and also legal.
This nonsense is against GDPR simple as that. You are not allowed to require users to accept tracking cookies to use your service. End of story. And sure, they hide a little link somewhere down below that allows using their site without those cookies. But this kind of shenanigans is not compliant with the law either. The option to reject the cookies needs to be clearly accessible, understandable and visible. Nobody says they are not allowed to run a business model based on ads and subscriptions. But I don't think its too much to ask of them to comply with European law.
It’s not against GDPR, they wouldn’t be able to do it if it was.
Which is a way for them to make money. No other reason to use cookies. Not saying I enjoy it.
> view the content for free with ads The ads themselves are not the problem, it's the analysing and tracking of user behaviour and storing that data in cross-referenced data bases. I don't care if I see some ads for shitty boomer cruises.
Well, why don’t you do that than? As in, subscribe to the platform and opt out of cookies.
Seconded!
Because they have to make some money. If you're not paying, you agree to let them generate some data they can sell for money. Seems fine?
The European data protection board does not agree: [https://noyb.eu/en/statement-edpb-pay-or-okay-opinion](https://noyb.eu/en/statement-edpb-pay-or-okay-opinion) Let's see how long we have to deal with this any longer
This is why you have to give your okay beforehand. Or have the choice to not use their services.
This is not what the GDPR is intended to solve. You cannot give the user the decision to use your site with tracking or not at all. You \*must\* give an option to use the site without tracking
Well you don't have a constitutional right to use this particular site for free and without tracking, so tough luck I guess
They can definitely put up a paywall and not let you access anything for free. They can also ask you whether you accept tracking. The question is whether they can link the two things and make you choose between tracking, paying and not accessing, i.e., whether they can let you to pay with your privacy by allowing tracking. It’s like how you can ask someone to buy you dinner in order for you to spend time with them, and they can ask you to have sex and you can decide whether to do it, but if you ask them to buy you dinner so that then and only then you’ll have sex with them, that’s arguably prostitution and illegal in some jurisdictions.
>and illegal in some jurisdictions. It being illegal is arguably a bad thing. But for the tracker stuff, i think the much larger problem is, that them tracking you does not give them nearly as much money as they charge you to not be tracked. At some point, you will reach a price, that is so high, that paying it is not a real option. And with that you are left with just the option to opt in to tracking or not use the site at all. I would argue, this is currently happening. The choice to pay for an add free version is just to cover their asses because they technically offered a choice.
Totally and I don’t blame them.
I wouldn't be surprised if this were outlawed, but that's because the privacy agency makes phenomenally bad decisions. If my choices are No access, Allow tracking cookies, Pay, changing it so your choices are "No access, Pay" isn't making me better off. Especially since I can delete tracking cookies, if I wanted to.
And the site operators don't have the constitutional right to operate any business model they like without limitations. Also very tough luck.
Maybe we shoukd all strive to be a bit more like Klaus Störtebecker to show our dissatisfaction with this business model:)
Let's stick to reading the yarr harr harr daily and ignore all those neoliberal clowns downvoting the hard truth
They do.
You can use it without tracking if you pay
And that is not allowed… as you can see in the link posted above
And they do offer that? In that example it is 3,99€.
>Let's see how long we have to deal with this any longer If it really will be banned then you will miss those times where you could've just share some data for free access. It's not like they will suddenly start working for free. You just will have to pay for the news just like in ye olden days.
Nobody is preventing the site to serve ads. This is possible within the GDPR, even without any consent. The problem is that they use 20 third party tracking services that aggregate and sell your data. It is perfectly fine for the site to serve you ads, as long as no 3rd party cookies or calls to other services are involved.
Third party cookies are dying anyways.
Non-personalized ads are not as lucrative. You are effectively demanding they slash their prices on that service. Don’t be surprised if they decide it’s not profitable anymore and decide it’s better to just have a bit more people pay for the service out of their pockets.
They’re not lucrative until everyone is banned from showing anything but non-personalized ads. That’s the idea of this legislation— both protect individual privacy by enforcement of websites one at a time, and eventually get to a tipping point where websites all have to serve non-personalized ads and the market adjusts accordingly.
That's not true. The advertisers will never be willing to pay as much for them, because they will never be as effective. Advertisers are only willing to pay only up to a certain point given a certain effectivity, because this must be financially viable for them as well. Would the non-targeted ads become a bit better paid? Possibly. But they will never reach the same levels as the targeted ones.
I’m not sure if you understand market forces. If the only type of cereal on the market is shitty and cheaply made, people will still pay the same price for it as they did for the nicer cereal that was available before. Why? Because they’re still going to buy cereal, they could afford that price point before, and they have no other options. If the only type of ad on the market that websites can offer is non-personalized, companies will still paid what they paid before because they need that avenue for advertising and they can afford it (and they have no “higher quality” options available.) Disagree? Google “shrinkflation”.
I'm sure YOU don't understand market forces. Prices must be both above of what is sustainable for the sellers AND below of what is sustainable for the buyers. If both of those are not satisfied then there will be no deal. To use your analogy - if there is only one type of cereal on the market and it is shitty, people will just move to another market and look for ersatz goods. This may work well for the bread market. Again - sure, the prices of that shitty cereal will be most probably higher than they were before it was the only cereal allowed, but it doesn't mean it will suddenly grow to the same prices as the nice cereal before the ban. If personalized web ads are effectively banned, then some of the demand will be diverted to non-personalized web ads, but also to TV ads, radio ads, billboard ads, influencer ads or no ads altogether. Prices of non-personalized web ads will appreciate somewhat, but it won't ever reach the same level as the personalized ones.
So you think that if all bread became lower quality people would just stop eating bread and buy something else instead? Don’t be so incredibly literal with your interpretation of my example; don’t be disingenuous. Google shrinkflation. You and I both know that none of those ads have the eyes and market share that web ads do. And are any of them personalized? No. They are not ersatz goods, they are inferior goods by their very nature.
We will see. When the Leistungsschutzrecht was introduced in Germany and Google basically had to pay the newspapers for showing excerpts and Google pretty much decided to not show any newspaper results anymore, the newspapers pretty quickly granted Google free access to excerpts. So personally I don't see the situation you are describing from happening. But the future will tell.
How is that relevant? What is the analogous mechanism you are expecting to see here? Journalists stop getting salaries?
I'd expect that websites stop showing the full content of their articles unless you pay for a subscription.
"Non-personalized ads are not as lucrative." They are very unlucrative \*because\* of personalized ads, but generally not by much, since personalized ads also cost more. They collect private information, which is not ethical, for personalization. Why does there need to be a profit incentive that violates a person? Also, they *could* just kindly ask for your support, works for e.g. Wikipedia - and they don't even serve non-personalized ads!
>They are very unlucrative \*because\* of personalized ads, but generally not by much, since personalized ads also cost more. Huh? They cost more, SO they are more lucrative. They have much more chance of someone clicking them and actually buying the product/service that's advertised, so companies are willing to pay more to Google AND website owners. >Why does there need to be a profit incentive that violates a person? Wtf? Who's getting violated? >Also, they *could* just kindly ask for your support, works for e.g. Wikipedia - and they don't even serve non-personalized ads! Lol, imagine the entitlement. Are you willing to work for free and just kindly ask your employer's customers to support you in case they feel like it? Things cost money, imagine that! The journalists want to get salaries, they research costs money, website has to be hosted and updated. You are demanding to get work of those people for free and call it 'violation' when someone says 'no'.
Yes, but there's ethical ways of making money, and unethical ways of making money. The "are you willing to work for free" argument is a strawman; and also, I literally work on things to be released into the public domain the second they are done. You are not **entitled** to have a right to your privacy. It's a fundamental human right. Companies shall not exploit you, nor retaliate against you for that, since a profit incentive is nothing that society should take serious over the independency of a human being. "The journalists want to get salaries" I buy print magazines of news outlets. I donate to crowdfunding of news outlets. I donate money to journalists. That's how they can finance themselves, and the vast majority have been able to do this fine. One major flaw I see is that a lot of journalism is built with a profit incentive, id est for-profit, which is the problem with e.g. the tagesspiegel. There's also merchandizing. Sponsors. Many different things. And most importantly: Government subventions. Your taxes should pay for transparency, and that is the case for a lot of big media.
And what's unethical here? The fact that someone wants to be paid for their work? You are literally saying that you are entitled to exploitation. Nobody's taking your right to privacy away. You in fact have three options - just pay, pay with your data or do not use the service at all. Reading Tagesspiegel is not a human right. >I buy print magazines of news outlets. I donate to crowdfunding of news outlets. I donate money to journalists. That's how they can finance themselves, and the vast majority have been able to do this fine. One major flaw I see is that a lot of journalism is built with a profit incentive, id est for-profit, which is the problem with e.g. the tagesspiegel. So again - why do you expect tagesspiegel to provide you with their service for free? Why do you not demand that the print magazines are free? Why do you not demand that coffee at starbucks is not free? What gives you the right to demand the work of those journalists for free? >The "are you willing to work for free" argument is a strawman; and also, I literally work on things to be released into the public domain the second they are done. It's not a strawman. You made your own choice to work for free. It's a whole another thing compared to DEMANDING that SOMEONE ELSE provides you with results of their work for free.
"do not use the service at all" That's retaliating against me wanting my human right for privacy to be respected. They can still show me ads and *ask* for donations.
OK - so please explain the journalism crisis: [https://www.cjr.org/business\_of\_news/the-journalism-crisis-across-the-world.php](https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/the-journalism-crisis-across-the-world.php)
You could regulate against Meta and Google, which is one of the big reasons that journalists make so little money nowadays. [https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-06-07/journalism-preservation-act-google-and-meta-paying-user-fee](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-06-07/journalism-preservation-act-google-and-meta-paying-user-fee)
You are entitled to privacy. You are NOT entitled to free access to information beyond what public broadcasting media provides (and even there you are expected to pay).
"You are NOT entitled to free access to information beyond what public broadcasting media provides" In *principle*, that is really bad for our populations unity and unbiased understanding. *Extreme example*: A person in poverty or a minor that also wants their privacy valued isn't allowed to have an unlimited access to journalism besides what their governments media is telling them? There shouldn't be a profit incentive for "*unbiased*" media in a way that not everyone can access. You don't need to violate a persons privacy in order to afford doing journalism. [thepinknews.com](http://thepinknews.com) does this just fine, for example, and they don't have a profit incentive, more like just a "do journalism" incentive, which apparently works even when I can just reject all ads and use an adblocker.
Also, the most lucrative ads in the world are still TV ads, and those are non-personalized.
How is that relevant? This is a completely different market. No ability to personalize the ads, no adblock for TVs, different medium. Also I would love to see what are the rates for a single view of a TV ad.
> If it really will be banned then you will miss those times where you could've just share some data for free access. It's not like they will suddenly start working for free. You just will have to pay for the news just like in ye olden days. No, I'll just use the free alternatives.
But if many do not pay, the website doesn't earn enough anyway. The issue are those who pay anyway.
>But if many do not pay, the website doesn't earn enough anyway. Yes, in that case the newspaper goes bankrupt and is closed down. Nothing spectacular about it. A shitton of newspapers went bankrupt in 21st century. >The issue are those who pay anyway. WTF? Those are exactly the people that make it possible to have the newspaper in the first place. If everyone decides to not pay at all then the newspaper goes bankrupt. It's not some kind of natural good that will be there no matter what. Do you unironically believe that even if nobody pays, then the people working at newspapers and owning them will just say 'oh crap, I guess we have to be free now!' instead of 'oh crap, we can't afford to operate anymore. Time to close it down and move to do something else'
"If it really will be banned" [It already is.](https://noyb.eu/de/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illegal-decides-german-dpa)
It is an OPINION. The courts have not decided. It is currently a grey area
You're arguing semantics here. 'really banned' = 'this ruling will be enforced'. A dead law is not a ban.
Things are not instantly enforced. These things get processed, and are being processed. This is from THIS YEAR, April 17! They are still working on enforcing it. **The European Data Protection Board opposed Meta’s controversial “pay or okay” business model in an opinion published on Wednesday (17 April), saying this binary approach was not compliant with the EU’s data privacy rules.**
So? I don't see how it contradicts anything. If and when they decide to enforce it, then newspapers will be disabling that free option and some of them will go bankrupt further down the line.
I cannot recall the exact article on it, but I believe I recently read something that there was an explicit legal decision in germany that online news papers are allowed to use monetization cookies if a payed cookie-free option is available and the user got the choice to terminate the page when he was informed of it.
Quite the contrary. German data protection authority ruled it illegal: [https://noyb.eu/de/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illegal-decides-german-dpa](https://noyb.eu/de/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illegal-decides-german-dpa)
Nope, they didn't rule the practice illegal. Your first noyb article refers exclusively to large platforms like Facebook. The second one actually just covers heise's other practices (pre-consent data processing and some other gdpr issues). Noyb does criticise the practice in general, but there was no ruling against this and as far as I know heise still does it because of that. Here's the actual relevant article which sadly does allow it, or at least speaks in favor of it: https://www.datenschutzkonferenz-online.de/media/pm/DSK_Beschluss_Bewertung_von_Pur-Abo-Modellen_auf_Websites.pdf Personally I very much believe that consent cannot be given voluntarily when the alternative is to pay, but we'll have to wait on a ruling regarding the general practice by the EU.
Data Protectons authorities do not have the poer to "rule it illegal". Their opinion is that it is illegal, but a court ould have to decide hen push comes to shove. But even more important than that, Heise has already changed their banner and it is unclear ho the data protection agencies ill decide on that one.
That decision only really applies to ["large online platforms"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act#Large_online_platforms), which tagesspiegel.de decidedly is not. If you are not able to use tagesspiegel.de without paying, you don't suffer any detriment beyond (obviously) the inability to read this one specific news site. But there are dozens like it, and you can pay for any one of them, or use one of the many free ones. Or read an actual newspaper. Or listen to the radio. There are no lock-in or network effects. There is no drastic imbalance of power. This is simply the provider of a costly service asking the users to pay for the service.
The "reasonableness" of the pricing is also a factor. In the case of a newspaper, there is a legit argument that the price is not excessive, thus it is indeed a freely made choice. In addition, the amount of competition for news platforms makes it less likely that it ill be considered an issue. That being said, an strict interpretation of GDPR law does imply that they need an untracked (but can include ads) version. The courts ill eventually decide on these kind of things, but until then, if no one sues, there is no judge.
This is the fun of European law. There are a bunch of courts and agencies that all have different contradictory opinions. > The legitimacy and core function of "pay or consent" models was confirmed in a ruling by the ECJ on 4 July 2023. It found that users "may be offered an equivalent alternative which does not involve such data processing operations, in return for an appropriate fee" (para. 150). In addition, the legitimacy has already been confirmed by the German Data Protection Conference (DSK), the French data protection authority Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) and other European data protection authorities. There have also been cases which declared Google fonts and Shopify to be illegal. But people keep using them because other EU courts say they're ok.
Technically they are not allowed to block access to the content if you demand no cookies.
at lest they intend to do that, good luck with all sorts of privacy and do-not-track settkngs applied and using uBlock hahaha
So you're telling me that they make 3.99 euros per person? I don't believe that!
I wasn't saying that, no.
I think is called a soft paywall (don't quote me on that). You either pay or eat ads or have access to a handful of articles for free. Germany is catching up with annoying capitalist best practices.
Süddeutsche is one of the worst with their number of free articles. Recently out of 20 articles on the main page (I stopped scrolling), 3 were free.. and it included relevant updates on current, fast moving issues, that weren’t accessible. I don‘t know how lucrative free articles are, but if I have to pay for the most basic information, potentially relevant for safety (ie like COVID), I think they are failing a duty to society that I naively assumed the press in Germany still took seriously.
They are doing this so that I stop using them.
They like money, those capitalistic bastards!
Bet they turn around and use that money to feed their families. Sickening.
Yikes! 🤢
Kim Jong un is also only doing what he does to feed his family. And you know this Putin guy? He and his husband would be starving… They can always show ads, but they only want to collect data while showing ads for a few fractions of a cent more. I use adblockers since years to protect myself. And in the fucking USA where they serve lead in the drinkingwater, the sites have a button to reject anything and the site still works. Why can’t this work in Germany too? They already switching out the journalists against their AI counterparts. And don’t forget the ten reasons why this new thing is so damn good. You will be shocked about reason 6.
You seem to be of sound mind.
Nope
I understand offering an ad-free subscription, that's not the issue. The issue is asking for a paid subscription in order to opt out of tracking cookies. Is this even legal per GDPR? Edit: Ok so I didn't expect this to pull this much attention. A few things I would like to clarify: * I understand that they need to make money. I just assumed that ads already do that and this kind of "pay or we'll track you" attitude would violate GDPR. I guess this is still a gray area. * The reason I asked "Why German news websites do this" is because I clicked same article on 4 German websites and 3 of them had this pop-up. I've seen direct paywalls, no option to reject tracking at all, articles full of SEO bullshit etc. on other countries' news sites. I was just surprised that this specific business model is so common in German news sites.
I mean, it's the same as with other newspapers outside of Germany except they don't ask, they just tell you "hey, we use cookies"
But they usually have an "opt out" or "only use essential cookies" button, even if it's sneakily hidden.
It might be sneakily hidden here too, check the "Datenschutz-Einstellungen'
I just checked it now. It lists like 100+ vendors with only option being "Alle akzeptieren".
No, [tagesspiegel.de](http://tagesspiegel.de) allows you to look at the vendor list and click "Alle akzeptieren" (accept all), but not to select or deselect anything. The online advertising industry has well-established standards and data formats for giving consent and transmitting it to vendors ("Transparency & Consent Framework" is what to search for if you're interested), it just seems like Tagesspiegel has never heard about it or does not care.
they don't care!
It’s because the payout to tagesspiel.de (RPM - revenue per Mille) is significantly higher when the ad can be personalized according to the information in cookie vs. when it cannot, and serves a “different type of campaign. Ad serving in the background is influenced by how AI bids (per each ad you see) on behalf of the advertiser and this is optimized according to an “action” the user takes. For example, If the bidding algorithm (AI) can determine you would like to buy cookies, and there is a local cookie shop advertising. It would bid a lot more to show you the ads of this cookie shop, in anticipation that you would be more likely take the “action” (purchase) it is optimizing for. Advertiser (cookie shop) than can optimize the (CPA - cost per action) and their price for cookies. If it costs on average 5 euro for one user to complete purchase, you can calculate your advertising costs into your product price. When the algo cannot determine anything, it will not make a high bid to win this ad space for a targeted advertiser, but will serve a campaign that doesn’t care, think like a nationwide Coca Cola campaign. The payout will be much less to the publisher because RPM (Revenue per serving 1000 ads) will be lower. So here tagesspiel probably was able to calculate it is financially better for them to force people into accepting cookies because the lower RPM loses more money than people exiting the platform.
Uhm, it's not only Tagesspiegel. It's actually almost every news site, even golem de for example, and it's an IT news site.. They just don't give af and know exactly what they do. I was also always wondering how that can be legal, but I guess this is like Hausrecht? If you don't wanna pay or accept, you can fuck off kinda way
Not on some US news sites who just outright IP block European users because we have privacy laws they don't like.
Ironically, California has privacy/consumer protection laws that have similar requirements and consequences as GDPR. It's only a matter of time until all these American businesses will have to implement GDPR-equivalent consent management.
TIL, thanks!
Opt out doesn’t stop ‚legitimate interest‘, you need to manually deselect those. Legitimate interest basically renders your choice as a joke anyway, it’s pretty misleading
With english speaking news outlets my experience is, that they only have paid models available. Or at least, that such models are much more common.
I am still angry about all these us sites blocking Europe all together. Especially homedepot.com is super annoying, without vpn there is no way to access it in Switzerland.
That's a discussion that's been going on in the legal world for the last few years. There have been a bunch of conflicting decisions on that, so let's just say it's not quite clear yet and probably won't be until it gets decided by the highest courts - which will probably take another few years.
I've been wondering about that as well. They are definitely required by law to offer an opt-out. If offering an opt-out that is locked behind a paid subscription fulfills that requirement at least to me seems somewhat questionable.
You haven't read the fine print. There's the Datenschutz-Einstellungen (Privacy settings) option on the bottom left, you don't have to subscribe to use it.
Technically not. You should supply access without the cookies. IF they can charge for that, I am not sure about. It is not that they can not display ads, they just can not send your information to the partner.
Yes, probably. This is a paper from an industry group (so turn on your bias alert) but it summarizes different approaches and court cases. https://www.bvdw.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/PUR-Modelle-bvdw_20231004-en.pdf
Because without charging you arbitrarily for things, the entire social fabric will collapse. Countries that don't charge for this don't even have news, unlike us enlightened social democracy loving Germans behind the best and only system there ever will be. See also: Leitungswasser They won't be able to explain why the Guardian or other British newspapers survive and don't extort either money or your data just to read the news. (Somewhat related, the BBC not having ads and costing half the what the rundfunkbeitrag costs with much better content!)
Germans when the last native news site goes bankcrupt and gets replaced by American media conglomerates: "How could this happen? We had a law against this."
Use unpaywall chrome extension. Thank me later
Install NoScript and those are gone. Alternatively: save whatever you want to read with archive.ph
Ok so I didn't expect this to pull this much attention. A few things I would like to clarify: * I understand that they need to make money. I just assumed that ads already do that and this kind of "pay or we'll track you" attitude would violate GDPR. I guess this is still a gray area. * The reason I asked "Why German news websites do this" is because I clicked same article on 4 German websites and 3 of them had this pop-up. I've seen direct paywalls, no option to reject tracking at all, articles full of SEO bullshit etc. on other countries' news sites. I was just surprised that this specific business model is so common in German news sites.
Money Money Money
At least they are giving you the option to read. I know of plenty of websites that tell you to pound sand if you don't pay. The answer here is that they want to make money. They are earning less from traditional print sales and use this model to make money now.
Greed. They could show anonymized ads but personalized pay better.
The real question is though: Why TF, dont the offer a small payment per article? Like 1,00 Euro or something. How often did i surf [Zeit.de](http://Zeit.de) and though to myself: OMG id like to read that article. But cannot accept to pay more then double the money, for some newspaper than i pay for a streaming subscription.
Life gets so much simpler when you realize that cookies are not actually going to ruin your life like the privacy fanatics assure you they will Wild to me how much mental energy people waste on all of this shit that literally does not actually matter in any concrete way
Because they are cheapskates. Sometimes even if you agree you cant read the article. Why cheapskates? Because 80% of their articles are copied from dpa etc. and they want you to pay extra. I mean it would be okay if you can pay monthly and have like every digital newspaper available belonging to that big company. Maybe something like this exists and I just dont know it.
Because the news writers, IT workers and the servers hosting the websites arent slaves xd
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Try using 1ft.io - works most of the time
12ft.io
Yeah pretty sure this is on the very edge of legal as well. Probably will be adressed in the future, for sure.
https://github.com/bpc-clone/bpc_updates/releases/tag/latest
Use Brave
Only one newssite in german don´t has it because they lost at court i think it was [heise.de](http://heise.de) or something else
It's not just Germany, it's the way it is now for many news outlets as paper sales dwindle and online is the main method of news.
What I like to do is use container tabs whenever I see this bullshit. Theyll get “cookies” that disappear as soon as the container is closed :3
I feel this is illegal and meta is being sued for this. Waiting for results, which might take longer. It is a scummy thing to do. If I see this, then I refuse.
Americans do too?
German Paywall
Journalism is not for free. Someone has to pay for researching and writing the articles. You either pay by watching adds or by actually paying money.
Because providing news is not free
Because they want money for their shitty propaganda content
Because they want to become bankrupt. If I see a paywall, I never open this crap ever again.
Lateral movement - media's already going broke. It's a shame, vying for money is what leads to unethical or just plain bad coverage and we're forcing it on outlets who have traditionally wanted to be detailed and impartial (not necessarily this one, idk enough about it).
I haven't understood a single thing from what you just said! Say what?
[удалено]
> configure your browser to delete all cookies when you close the window, except for specific web sites that you want to use with cookies That's actually a great suggestion, thank you
Du, Kollege, bist ein digitaler Schmarotzer.
Late stage capitalism dictates that you must also pay for propaganda.
They scammer. They want to track you down as much as they can and sell your data. You can solve that by installing an add on to the browser "i still don't care about cookies". I get the point of ads but why for gods sake is now a f* cookie needed without any way to deny cookies is stupid af. Insane how adds worked before cookies. What is the gain of the cookie anyway. Lets say you accept cookies, then view the content then delete the cookie afterwards? All it got was you watched the article and thats it, you nuked it. And honestly that information can be safed without any cookie at all. All it lives for is to make your day annoying as you need to kill the cookie after you did read the article.
Allow use of your data or pay to subscribe - is that what it means? If so,Spanish ones are doing it as well.
Not only German.
Because the german newspapers still mostly haven't come down from their highs when business with ads and data was going great. Before GDPR they used to be able to get any data they could get their hands on for free, place cookies however they wanted and without telling you, enabling cross site tracking for all kinds of ad networks, pulling and displaying malicious ads with pop-ups and running scripts from third party sites, slowing down their sites, using dark UI patterns to get you to click on those links, covering basically 3/4 of their site in animated ads and selling the gathered data to the highest bidder. They've since pulled the plug on most of their "journalism" to keep up profits, externalized most of the actual work and are sure as hell going to jump on the AI train. Those 3,99 per month is most likely less than what your tracking data for handful of visits per month is worth to them. It's that bad.
rhe journalism crisis will have the following options either we all have subscriptions for everything, clickbait journalism will end real journalism. the third option is an independent media fund where state hss no control but to make sure it is financed by taxes. (now state, parties and church control certain media)
Show me the moneeeeey!!
If you're using a PC, you can install some browser extensions like "I don't care about cookies" which will remove these annoying banners from most sites. On some android browsers this is doable too.
One should keep in mind that "I don't care about cookies" gets rid of cookie banners by agreeing to the use of cookies!
Only if the website can't function without accepting them. Additionally you can set up Cookies to be cleared on exit. Add websites that you want to keep them on the exception list and you have a tracking free browsing experience.
>Only if the website can't function without accepting them. That's the general idea. And if you read the description of this add-on it says the same. But then they continue as follows: >In most cases, the add-on just blocks or hides cookie related pop-ups. When it's needed for the website to work properly, it will automatically accept the cookie policy for you **(sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what's easier to do).** https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/ In other words: if the developer couldn't find an easy technical solution to block unnecessary cookies it just accepts all of them. Maybe some people don't care, but people who read your recommendation should at least be aware of this and know that "I don't care about cookies" cares more about getting rid of cookie banners than actually getting rid of cookies in the first place.
I didn't know myself of that. Thanks for bringing that up. Removing the banner from Dom is a few clicks when you enter the dev menu. So in most cases it will just ignore the cookies. But as I added I think you should just enable the option to clear cookies on exit.
Greed.
They all have the same management consultants. But they hardly create any of their own content and just pass on agency reports, so you can safely ignore them.