11–20 of 38 posts
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This! What benefit does any of this current system provide us anyway?
Devil's Advocate? It pays for the services we use for free.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This! What benefit does any of this current system provide us anyway?
Devil's Advocate? It pays for the services we use for free.
Absolutely crazy interpretation: "At the same time, only 1-7% of all users want to be tracked for online advertisement if asked openly. However, "pay or okay" gets 99.9% of users to agree to online tracking. If more than 90% of users do not get what they genuinely want, we have everything but a "genuine" choice." If I got to the shop and don't want to buy the product I should just get it for free, because that is wha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't offering paid access exactly that? Or what do you have in mind?
Paid access is okay, so is showing advertising, and even requiring that you pay to access a service (they don’t have to give it away for free). What isn’t okay is requiring either paying or selling your data (selling away privacy) for advertising. So yes businesses are doing something okay by offering a paid version, but it doesn’t matter if they’re saying “pay or let us sell your data” as the latter is illegal.
IMHO, decisions that have upheld that it is indeed illegal have tended to be "militant" and ignored that users had a genuine choice, and in fact 3 options: Accept cookies, etc or pay or leave. In practice we see that 99% of users choose to accept cookies/tracking, but this is not because the choice isn't genuine, it is because they don't care about cookies/tracking as long it means free access and that pisses off some people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't offering paid access exactly that? Or what do you have in mind?
Paid access is okay, so is showing advertising, and even requiring that you pay to access a service (they don’t have to give it away for free). What isn’t okay is requiring either paying or selling your data (selling away privacy) for advertising. So yes businesses are doing something okay by offering a paid version, but it doesn’t matter if they’re saying “pay or let us sell your data” as the latter is illegal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paid access is okay, so is showing advertising, and even requiring that you pay to access a service (they don’t have to give it away for free). What isn’t okay is requiring either paying or selling your data (selling away privacy) for advertising. So yes businesses are doing something okay by offering a paid version, but it doesn’t matter if they’re saying “pay or let us sell your data” as the latter is illegal.
"The latter is illegal" has been a point of debate since the GDPR was inacted because it is certainly not obvious in the GDPR. IMHO, decisions that have upheld that it is indeed illegal have tended to be "militant" and ignored that users had a genuine choice, and in fact 3 options: Accept cookies, etc or pay or leave. In practice we see that 99% of users choose to accept cookies/tracking, but this is not because the…
Regardless, I’m not sure if you’re right that it’s contentious about what is allowed with respect to GDPR here. My understanding is that it is illegal to do what’s here (not just in Austria but in the GDPR directly), and the companies that do this are doing it in bad faith (and/or following in the footsteps of Meta), and in reality what they’re doing is banking on the fact that going through the courts takes a long time. We wouldn’t even be having this discussion if these companies just put ads without tracking/selling user data, which, as mentioned, is fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paid access is okay, so is showing advertising, and even requiring that you pay to access a service (they don’t have to give it away for free). What isn’t okay is requiring either paying or selling your data (selling away privacy) for advertising. So yes businesses are doing something okay by offering a paid version, but it doesn’t matter if they’re saying “pay or let us sell your data” as the latter is illegal.
There’s an obvious workaround - require the payment for everyone, and on the side offer to pay the customer $x (which coincidentally is the same as the payment needed) for personal information.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The latter is illegal" has been a point of debate since the GDPR was inacted because it is certainly not obvious in the GDPR. IMHO, decisions that have upheld that it is indeed illegal have tended to be "militant" and ignored that users had a genuine choice, and in fact 3 options: Accept cookies, etc or pay or leave. In practice we see that 99% of users choose to accept cookies/tracking, but this is not because the…
You cannot say that users as a whole accept cookies/tracking as it’s heavily region dependent. At a previous job we implemented a cookie consent banner and tracked statistics of accept/reject, and while some regions were very high (95+%), Germany was particularly low (70%), so it’s hard to paint a picture in a general way. Regardless, I’m not sure if you’re right that it’s contentious about what is allowed with respe…
> My understanding is that it is illegal to do what’s here (not just in Austria but in the GDPR directly),
That's exactly my point. The GDPR does not say that it is illegal. It says that people must have a genuine choice, "genuine" meaning free of coercion. Now, "accept or be fired", "accept or you can't have surgery" are obviously not genuine choices. But arguing that "accept or you need to pay to access this news website" is the same and not a genuine choice is almost pushing the interpretation ad absurdum (what are genuine choices, then?), hence my previous comment.
> We wouldn’t even be having this discussion if these companies just put ads without tracking/selling user data, which, as mentioned, is fine.
The real world never so simple. In the real world if they don't "just" do that it is probably because it isn't working commercially.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s an obvious workaround - require the payment for everyone, and on the side offer to pay the customer $x (which coincidentally is the same as the payment needed) for personal information.
I don't think this trick would do anything - you're still conditioning a contract on consent (and it's no more necessary than before), so still don't have "freely given consent" if you wanted to rely on that basis for data processing.