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.
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
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.
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"
“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.
Is this
🦋
💁♂️
Peak enshittification?
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.
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.
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"
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.
How can you pay to block cookies if they would need a cookie to remember that you paid?
"Back to concent"
Fucking animals.
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
Daily mail does it as well. Cancer. But not hard to circumvent with Firefox and some extensions.
Get yourself the Consent-o-Matic browser extension and watch these “we and our 8000 partners (hungrily) value your privacy” banners disappear.
If you stumble upon a web site that Consent-o-Matic does not handle, you can simply click the extension, click “Submit for Review”, and the devs will shortly add support for that site.
But does that auto accept cookies like many of these other anti cookie banner extensions?
You can customize how the extension handles cookie banners. See an example of current settings on most updated extension at time of this comment:
uBlock Origin has two cookie filters that are disabled by default. I enabled that and ditched the consent-o-matic extension
GDPR, go gettem.
You cannot share customer data with third parties without explicit consent. It has to be clearly labelled and not hidden in T&Cs
That's an EU thing ¯(ツ)/¯
It's still a uk thing. I was the GDPR officer for our company when it was introduced and as far as I know it hasn't been repealed in UK law yet.
Edit: Looking into it further it appears that we now have a UK GDPR law which is essentially the same thing and is in lockstep with the EU version.
UK also has GDPR. They left the EU after GDPR was passed and now have "UK GDPR" which is practically the same as the EU
FYI you should probably be blocking/whitelisting cookies client-side anyways. At the very least, disable third party cookies.
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 :)
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.
Basically every other German outlet
Don't forget every other food blog 😑
I NEED COOKIE 🍪 💉💪
Only answer is to ban tracking cookies
“News” outlet? Hardly. The mirror is basically Russian propaganda.
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 🙁
@BMP5k the worst part is that you pay to still see ads :blobcatfacepalm:
What do you mean? Those are standard cookie banners. What The Mirror does is different
"Part of Reach"
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.
For those unaware, NoScript plugin helps with this.