UK News outlet asking for a subscription to reject cookies.
Not sure how long this has been a thing but I was surprised to see that you cannot view the content without either agreeing to all or paying to reject.
402
Comments87Not sure how long this has been a thing but I was surprised to see that you cannot view the content without either agreeing to all or paying to reject.
A common thing in continental Europe too. NOYB and some EU lawmakers are trying to make these pay-or-ok schemes illegal, but I guess in the UK you will be out of luck regarding that.
Wouldn't this be blatantly in conflict with the EU cookie law? Like I'm not from Europe but my understanding was that it needs to be equally easy to accept or reject all cookies. Dark patterns aren't allowed
Currently it's a grey area I think
It's not a grey area, it's clearly illegal (consent has to be given voluntarily. If you can't use the site without paying, that's not voluntary). Agencies so far just decided to look the other way and play dumb. There are lawsuits ongoing.
https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2024/edpb-consent-or-pay-models-should-offer-real-choice_en
UK is not EU, so EU law does not apply.
Person I'm responding to said this was common in continental Europe
I've never seen one of these before
I’ll call bullshit on that until examples given…
www.spiegel.de
www.faz.net
www.sueddeutsche.de
www.heise.de
www.golem.de
www.derstandard.at
www.repubblica.it/
I don’t think you understand what we are talking about here regarding the Mirror.
You called bullshit on it being common on the continent, I provided examples from the continent.
i think this one might, actually. When the EU passes a law like this, each member state passes it into their own national law, and so if these cookies laws were implemented before the UK left the EU they’d likely still be there
It's more than that. The EU law lets any EU citizen report a company that's not in compliance. That includes companies not strictly in the EU. It's why even US companies tend to be in compliance (or something like compliance).
If their product is accessible from within the EU, they have to implement the proper rules. That’s why many of the minor / weird news sites aren’t accessible from the EU anymore without VPN. Which I consider a win for EU citizens.
It's even broader. An EU citizen living anywhere accessing any site can report that site. It may be that the EU won't be able to collect the fine--assuming the owners never travel to the EU--but they can be fined.
The GDPR was enacted in 2016 and came into effect in 2018. The UK left the EU in 2020.
But UK laws do, which share a lot of commonality - like the GDPR
I think this type of scheme is illegal under the GDPR, which is in effect in the UK just as it is in the EU.
It's been a while since I worked with the GDPR, but from memory the wording is such that:
The data holder needs to allow people to opt out of data collection. The subject can request to be forgotten. The data holder explicitly cannot charge for this.
But changes move slow, and The Mirror is probably banking on nobody caring enough to complain, and Trading Standards being too underfunded and swamped with other work to investigate otherwise (which they are). If they're challenged, they'll just change tack, go "oops" and are unlikely to hit big fines unless they dig in.
Cookie laws are a horrible mess and always have done - the resulting consent banners are far more intrusive than anyone wanted.
The EU is now fighting such schemes though.
That’s doubtful - you have examples? Because if the service is based in the EU I’ll send those to the appropriate agency today.
In Spain too, try marca.com, abc.es or el pais.es.
Like basically every German news outlet? And this is already being contested in courts as some German data protection agencies (falsely IMHO) ruled this as valid.
Lmao even if you pay, you still see ads, they just won't track you. What an insane monetization scheme
Actually they still track you, they just don't share the information with advertisers. This is hte "pay or ok" model of blackmailing users to accept cookies and tracking. More or less what Facebook did last year, but Facebook charged a price tag that was higher than what Netflix costs! In the EU, this is not what was intended, and is currently being redefined
https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2024/edpb-consent-or-pay-models-should-offer-real-choice_en
Absolutely wild that they're still allowed to call this "consent"
If we imagine the idea of sexual consent being given in the same circumstances, it sounds a lot like a fucking crime.
"Either you consent to having sex with me right now or you pay me a subscription fee in order to not consent. If you do that, I'll still fuck you, but I'll use protection"
I like this analogy; it's provocative and it made me think about the issue for longer than I would have otherwise.
However, after some thought, I don't think it aligns perfectly since the user can simply choose not to read the article, so there's an option where they don't get fucked.
In the same vein, I think we could make a better analogy to sexting. You meet someone, seem to hit it off, and when the texts and pictures get a little spicy, they hit you with a, "you can pay me now and I will keep all of this in my private spank-bank, otherwise I'm going to share our entire relationship with a group chat I'm in with 1200+ people"
I think this is a bit stronger because it hits on a few notes where the hook-up analogy falls short: sharing of sensitive information, extortion in exchange for gratification, and the potential for an ongoing relationship.
Idk, what do you think?
I see where you're coming from, but my understanding is that the tracking cookies are already on your machine when the banner is presented, so they've already put in the proverbial tip.
Lmfao the proverbial tip. OK you got me there 😂
Just the tip 😏
At least one German outlet has been shown to still track you after paying. Just a bit less. So they use a rubber with a few holes poked in.
We are rapidly nearing a point where you can't read online news from any major (ergo "widely considered somewhat credible") source without one of those schemes. So I'd argue that the alternative is to just not get access to online news, and that may be considered too much pressure to still consider consent as voluntary.
Sadly, newspapers are not considered "platforms". A platform is a site that publishes user generated content, so lemmy or facebook. And not all platforms are large platforms too.
So while this is a good first step, it doesn't cover all online services.
My bad. I assumed that all websites were platforms.
“But if we don’t track you, we lose all the money we’d have made selling your data to Oxford Analytics so they can help Putin convince your uncle to vote for far-right candidates?!?”
"News outlet" might be the most generous interpretation I've ever seen.
They can always go shittier. Nothing will stop them until the entire human population is strapped into a matrix style ad network, 24/7... paid for by you, renting your neurons as compute for AI to generate more ads and supporting analytics for yourself... until your profitability quotient falls below average and they liquify your corpse to feed a more profitable gen of the attention crop.
Like in that Black Mirror episode when it was checking if you're watching the ad and you could only pay to skip it.
Soylent green is people! SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLEEEEEEE!!
Well ok, they have no GDPR.
German news outlets all do it. The data protection agencies have sadly so far ruled it's ok (there are still ongoing lawsuits afaik).
Every outlet in Italy as well.
It's standard practice in France too. This is not forbidden by RGPD.
you Frenchies and your fucked up transposed acronyms
Shut the fuck up or I'll go OTAN on your ass.
Careful, your 5.56 OTAN bullets might shoot backwards.
I don't think they repealed it. And besides, it applies to EU citizens regardless.
Just don't read The Mirror. Generally not worth the effort of moving your eyes from one word to the next.
Refer them to the EU. EU is going after Meta for charging for an ad-free plan. Oh, right. The EU only goes after USA corporations and deliberately wrote their rules to exclude companies like Spotify. Oh wait, there was Brexit, so it doesn't matter anyway. Brits voted themselves right to fucking shit. Kinda like what we might do in a few months.
Vote. The stupid people definitely will, so it's necessary to combat them.
And fuck abstaining on the basis of we only have two bad choices, I want a true leftist candidate. I would too, but by abstaining you are basically taking the bullshit liberal position of "I can't tell the difference between these two things"
How can you pay to block cookies if they would need a cookie to remember that you paid?
I've seen this on a few sites. They aren't even allowed to make rejecting cookies more difficult than accepting them but right now the legal people are trying to educate before they starting enforcing these rules. I expect the lawyers at the Mirror know that this is illegal but think they can get away with it.
All those things like having to "customise" your cookies to turn them all off, and "legitimate interest" is all illegal under the rules but they're trying their luck.
It's a litmus test for me. Just tells me not to use their site.
The Mirror website is cancer. I use NoScript and it won't load without allowing about 50 fuckkng scripts. MSN too. I avoid both but occasionally click on a link from elsewhere
"Back to concent"
Fucking animals.
I have this but it's no good for consent-or-pay, unfortunately.
if you need a consent-or-pay example, just open La Repubblica's homepage. You will be prompted with the "accept all cookies or pay" prompt as soon as you open the site. Pretty standard practice for most Italian online newspapers, sadly
Even UBO doesn't work here. Zapping the element, just pops it back up. Crazy
E: disabling js does seem to allow access to the site and articles, though you can't interact with anything (comments and such).
I should clarify that it very well might work if I was ok consenting to everything! But since there's no option to decline without paying...🤷♂️
But does that auto accept cookies like many of these other anti cookie banner extensions?
uBlock Origin has two cookie filters that are disabled by default. I enabled that and ditched the consent-o-matic extension
Daily mail does it as well. Cancer. But not hard to circumvent with Firefox and some extensions.
uBlock origin, can access the page fine, without showing any promts. I have more or less all filters turned on though (cookie popups, social media trackers etc)
Good to know. Hopefully they don't find a way to negate uBlock
A lot of websites in France have done the same for the past couple of years. Including Allociné, me ex-go-to source of information for movies and movie theatre schedule. Result: I have blocked those websites and I prefer pirating.
Can you manually uncheck all then save it?
They are all unchecked by default but you can't save and exit, it just loops back to the subscribe screen.
Happy cake day :)
“News” outlet? Hardly. The mirror is basically Russian propaganda.
FYI you should probably be blocking/whitelisting cookies client-side anyways. At the very least, disable third party cookies.
Basically every other German outlet
Don't forget every other food blog 😑
Only answer is to ban tracking cookies
I NEED COOKIE 🍪 💉💪
Or you could edit cookies with devtools.
Or just use uBlock Origin ;)
At work they don't let us install ublock or FF so I'm stuck with stock Chrome and stock Microsoft Chrome 🙁
This is their homepage, in case anyone is looking https://www.mirror.co.uk/
That's insane. I always leave a website whenever it tries anything even close to that. These companies are taking the piss more and more.
What do you mean? Those are standard cookie banners. What The Mirror does is different
For those unaware, NoScript plugin helps with this.
"Part of Reach"