Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by alkonaut 1934 days ago
That sounds like an extremely business friendly interpretation of the regulation. Creating a separate service (the paid one) shouldn’t in any way change the circumstances for the first service (the one with ads).

What you are describing sounds like a business can simply declare “well untargeted ads doesn’t pay enough so the options are tracking ads or paid subscriptions”. The regulation shouldn’t and doesn’t let a site make that decision. It would make it completely useless!
1 comments
dogma1138 1934 days ago
DPAs including the German on are quite “business” friendly unless it will be challenged in court.

You can’t force someone to provide their business at a loss.

As long as you don’t penalize or segregate users based on their decision alone it does not run afoul of GDPR, neither does blocking someone completely you just need to have a valid business reason for doing that and it has to be tied to the nature of the service including how it’s funded.

link
alkonaut 1934 days ago
> You can’t force someone to provide their business at a loss.

Of course not. But no one is forced to provide the ad funded service at all.

link
dogma1138 1934 days ago
No but it’s a valid business model.

It’s not upto the DPAs to regulate things at this level just like you could run an astrology service and collect PII to give people readings, astrology is horseshit but you won’t run into issues with GDPR if you request users to give you their birthday and email to get spammed with BS on a daily basis.

link
alkonaut 1934 days ago
> you could run an astrology service and collect PII to give people readings

Processing or possibly even keeping a birthdate for an astrology newsletter is clearly a legitiamate interest for the subscriber of that newsletter.

> but it’s a valid business model.

What is? Showing ads to provide a service is a valid business model yes. Showing tracking ads or blocking those who don't accept the ads - no.

But "I need to show the ads to keep the lights on" is NOT a legitimate interest to the visitor. The reason for handling the personal infrmation needs to be a hard requirement to provide service itself. Not merely part of the "business model". You cannot set up a separate service (paid subscription) and argue that because that other service exists, your ad-funded service deserves special exceptions from the GDPR e.g. that it can show ads which are tracked or else users are blocked. It's pretty clear in the regulation that "cookie walls" aren't allowed, just like pre-checked/assumed consent isn't.

link
dogma1138 1934 days ago
Legitimate interest as defined in the GDPR isn’t that of the user, it’s that of the business.

You can provide users with a binary choice, as long as it’s all or nothing and the free service and paid service are separate it’s acceptable.

link
alkonaut 1934 days ago
Legitimate interest can be for anything (user, business, society as a whole) but it's still highly questoinable whether sharing peoples PII for ads alone is a legitimate interest (It's not clear it isn't either - the text is deliberately vague). What's clear is that you can't show people "by entering you accept to". You have to show them an opt out and if they opt out they need to get a service that is as good as if they opt in. Binary choice shouldn't help - if that has been a judgement it's very dubious imho.
link