News websites & Cookies - Going a step too far?

[Resident]

So it seems that a number of news websites now are starting to try and hold the viewer at ransom via the cookie consent.

At least 6 major sites are now employing "Consent or Pay" for cookie settings

Basically you either pay for your "privacy" ie pay to reject cookies or you have to consent to all cookies in order to access the site.

I did a little research and at least 2 of the news site, if you accept, allow tracking cookies from over 1000 'legitimate vendors'.

Is this going too far?

There are some that believe that the practice may not be completely legal. The following is an excerpt from a Reddit post:

The paywall option in and of itself is fine. Nothing says anyone has to give you access to their site for free. The specifics will depend on the terms of the paywall, but those are out of scope here.

The free option, however, does not appear to be properly compliant. This is because it requires consent for cookies, and implies (and does not offer separately) consent for further processing of personal data. It bundles the two together, and conditions access to the free option on providing consent, which means that, by definition, the consent is not "freely given". It's important to realise that "consent" and "freely given" have particular meaning in the context of GDPR.

This would suggest that they aren't however as it stands it needs to be tested in a court of law.

There is a lot more to the reddit post how the long and short of it is:

• No, this practice is probably not compliant with GDPR because consent is not "freely-given"
• The paywall is a distraction. They don't have to allow access for free, but if they do they can't condition it on consent to unnecessary data processing.
• The cookies are a distraction. PECR might not cover some of these, but the cookies exist to support the sort of data processing that GDPR absolutely does cover.

Interested to hear further thoughts?

 

[Resident]

I don’t think it’s fair expecting to have stuff for free.


But I’m not willing to pay for most of these sites as the quality of content is poor, and I’m not willing to be the product.



Subscription burnout for me - I feel like everything has become a monthly cost.

Most sites that give the choice freely state that you'll still be served ads on the site but they won't necessarily be 'targeted' to your preferences because the tracking cookies won't be present to track what you've looked at.

What I object to is that viewing data being sold on to hundreds of vendors & these Consent or Pay systems to me are almost ransom sites. Give us money or give us your personal data.