The Sun are asking people to pay to reject advertising cookies

ben

ben

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I have never seen such insanity. How legal is this? Presumably they have found some sort of loophole in GDPR

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Sounds fair to me. They're paying for the servers and the content. Website should be used on their terms.

They have, however, made their website unusable over the years. The content is trash.

There is no loophole, just use the site or don't.
 
username said:
They have, however, made their website unusable over the years. The content is trash.
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Same as the Daily Mail, if you use that without any ad blockers, it's like an STI for your device.

I use the Brave browser so the site is useable, the content and journalism is another matter.
 
username said:
Sounds fair to me. They're paying for the servers and the content. Website should be used on their terms.

They have, however, made their website unusable over the years. The content is trash.

There is no loophole, just use the site or don't.
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Well, no. If you're operating a website in the EU or the UK, you need to comply with the regulations. Making people pay to reject advertising cookies is morally wrong. They don't want to display personalised ads, they want to sell your data to thousands of other vendors. It's not fair, it's theft and it's because of this attitude that things like this are commonplace now. You might be OK being a human cash cow, but plenty of us aren't. I don't read The Sun as it's absolute shite, but I just landed on this site today after clicking a product link and this is what I was presented with. An absolute liberty if you ask me and the fact ICO are investigating it, speaks volumes, as they barely do fuck all.
 
ben said:
Well, no. If you're operating a website in the EU or the UK, you need to comply with the regulations. Making people pay to reject advertising cookies is morally wrong. They don't want to display personalised ads, they want to sell your data to thousands of other vendors. It's not fair, it's theft and it's because of this attitude that things like this are commonplace now. You might be OK being a human cash cow, but plenty of us aren't. I don't read The Sun as it's absolute shite, but I just landed on this site today after clicking a product link and this is what I was presented with. An absolute liberty if you ask me and the fact ICO are investigating it, speaks volumes, as they barely do fuck all.
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The law is - ask people for permission to store and process personal data.

They're asking, so I don't see the problem.

Morals don't really come into it as far as I can tell.
 
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ben said:
They don't want to display personalised ads, they want to sell your data to thousands of other vendors. It's not fair, it's theft and it's because of this attitude that things like this are commonplace now
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I'd disagree. So long as they aren't opting you in before you click either of those options, you can always close your browser and decide that you don't want to use their site. It maybe that people do that, and The Sun lose even more money from showing standard generic ads to less people because they have left the site.

In my opinion the conditions to use a private website are clear, it's up to the user to decide if they want to continue or not.
 
username said:
The law is - ask people for permission to store and process personal data.

They're asking, so I don't see the problem.

Morals don't really come into it as far as I can tell.
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Maybe you're right. I don't know. To me it just looks bad.
 
I think the rights and wrongs of this depend on the extent to which we want the state to protect stupid people from themselves.
 
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GreyWing said:
In my opinion the conditions to use a private website are clear, it's up to the user to decide if they want to continue or not.
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That is my view as well in a nutshell.

Zero time for The Sun.

ICO won't go against the stance taken IMHO, time will tell.
 
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It seems very fair and reasonable to me what the Sun are doing (The Daily Mail are doing it too). I despise both as organisations but have zero issue with this at all.

If you're on their site, you're the product you're not the customer. Its up to you, pay and be anonymous or don't pay and get the content for 'free' but have ads displayed to you in a way that someone makes some money.

The disclaimer is extremely clear - nobody can possibly say they didn't understand either of the 2 options. Or more importantly the 3rd one, go somewhere else for your news if you don't agree.
 
Marek said:
nobody can possibly say they didn't understand either of the 2 options. Or more importantly the 3rd one, go somewhere else for your news if you don't agree.
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Indeed. I would also argue that it's more clear than most annoying "GDPR" popups.

GDPR popups ruined the internet. Laws dreamt up by people that pretend to care, but don't really.
 
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username said:
Indeed. I would also argue that it's more clear than most annoying "GDPR" popups.

GDPR popups ruined the internet. Laws dreamt up by people that pretend to care, but don't really.
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Absolutely
 
I think it's a good thing actually, as it raises awareness about advertising in general (although people will quickly become blind to it, of course)

This makes it more obvious that you're the product and if you want to use their site, then you acknowledge and agree to that.

Previously, you would have just clicked agree and not given it a second thought.
 
temp123 said:
This makes it more obvious that you're the product and if you want to use their site, then you acknowledge and agree to that.
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...or you are accessing something that costs money to produce that you have had for free without thinking for years 😃
 
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