El Pais paywall can be disabled via reader view in your web browser.
Holy shit
Think I’ve seen this twice now in the past couple years, but yeah it’s likely not compliant with the cookie law in EU
This is perfectly legal, the law only says that the user must freely choose to allow the website to save said data. You can opt out here and not use that website.
In EU with their GDPR/cookie laws. I’m pretty sure hiding the declining of tracking or cookies behind a paywall is not supported under those laws.
Idk what’s the big deal, honestly. Remember the memes about yt premium, “I either give you my money, or my data, but not both”? Well, it’s kinda like that. The caveat is, their payment provider likely still collects data, and some info is saved on the backend anyways, but that’s another can of worms.
Asshole design is asshole design. They’re essentially saying here that they’ll sell your data whatever you choose, opting out is not an option.
Obviously there’s easy ways to bypass this but it’s not an excuse for them
Edit: also, their “cookie (and data sharing ) policy”:
Clicking on “accept cookies” you’re agreeing WAY more than implied
To me it looks more like they’re saying they’ll monetize their work no matter what, tho. One way is through direct payments by those who consider their articles worth paying for, then they don’t need to sell userdata or show ads; the other way is selling userdata. Well, there’s also non-targeted advertising, but mb it doesn’t worth as much or something (and targeted ads already pay close to nothing from a single viewer, afaik).
Where I personally draw the line is when such subscriptions still include ads (looking at you, “ad-free” disney+) or have unnecessarily large costs and so on. I mean, if they charge close to what they’re making with ads and selling data, we could get most websites ~tracker-free for probably a couple of bucks a month each. This, in turn, lessens the power of ad network owners, which again makes the web better. Although, mb I’m idealizing too much, idk.
