This is great but how can we disincentivize businesses from trying to play games like this with the law? Simply telling them to stop once someone had to go through a lengthy court case against them is not going to be enough.
"At the same time, only 1-7% of all users want to be tracked for online advertisement if asked openly. However, "pay or okay" gets 99.9% of users to agree to online tracking. If more than 90% of users do not get what they genuinely want, we have everything but a "genuine" choice."
If I got to the shop and don't want to buy the product I should just get it for free, because that is what I genuinely want? Genuine choice = I get to choose exactly what I want, always?
Edit, because people seem to miss the point:
Just because populist politicians want to legally restrict business from offering a choice does not mean that a "genuine" choice is not presented.
Paid access is okay, so is showing advertising, and even requiring that you pay to access a service (they don’t have to give it away for free). What isn’t okay is requiring either paying or selling your data (selling away privacy) for advertising.
So yes businesses are doing something okay by offering a paid version, but it doesn’t matter if they’re saying “pay or let us sell your data” as the latter is illegal.
There’s an obvious workaround - require the payment for everyone, and on the side offer to pay the customer $x (which coincidentally is the same as the payment needed) for personal information.
I don't think this trick would do anything - you're still conditioning a contract on consent (and it's no more necessary than before), so still don't have "freely given consent" if you wanted to rely on that basis for data processing.
"The latter is illegal" has been a point of debate since the GDPR was inacted because it is certainly not obvious in the GDPR.
IMHO, decisions that have upheld that it is indeed illegal have tended to be "militant" and ignored that users had a genuine choice, and in fact 3 options: Accept cookies, etc or pay or leave. In practice we see that 99% of users choose to accept cookies/tracking, but this is not because the choice isn't genuine, it is because they don't care about cookies/tracking as long it means free access and that pisses off some people.
You cannot say that users as a whole accept cookies/tracking as it’s heavily region dependent. At a previous job we implemented a cookie consent banner and tracked statistics of accept/reject, and while some regions were very high (95+%), Germany was particularly low (70%), so it’s hard to paint a picture in a general way.
Regardless, I’m not sure if you’re right that it’s contentious about what is allowed with respect to GDPR here. My understanding is that it is illegal to do what’s here (not just in Austria but in the GDPR directly), and the companies that do this are doing it in bad faith (and/or following in the footsteps of Meta), and in reality what they’re doing is banking on the fact that going through the courts takes a long time. We wouldn’t even be having this discussion if these companies just put ads without tracking/selling user data, which, as mentioned, is fine.
Tracking is not payment nor is the company entitled to track people. Der Standard is free to ask for money. They are not free to make tracking condition of a service.
What you miss is that the EU has decided that your business can not depend on people selling their privacy. This is very far from crazy, we disallow many other types to businesses too.
If EU punished the choice to provide the user an option to pay to not be tracked, EU ought to illegalise the entire business model of ad-supported “free” media where end user is the product delivered to advertisers, with no choice to not be tracked—even if you are not, in fact, a user (your shadow profile will still be built); otherwise seems to be hypocritical.
To pay to not be tracked is a joke of a choice—no one would choose to pay—but it only highlights the dark reality of how ad-supported media distort the market: honest competition is impossible against a “free” offer with a difficult to understand catch.
At this point I think that this kind of tracking should be forbidden by law.
People should not have an option to accept "being spied at all times on their personal behavior". It is creepy, it is dangerous and it is inhuman.
The exceptions should be the ones that currently already exist in GDPR. Financial institutions can use data to track fraud, law enforcement can use data from ongoing criminal cases, etc.
To have an option "to be spied" is a dystopian result of the lawlessness and bad faith on the Internet.
I feel that's only really true in the way it is of a JS bitcoin miner. Locally appears to make something free (if ignoring time/energy) that wasn't before, but is overall a detriment to average affordability because it's a net loss of resources (mostly just a zero-sum game, with some small side benefits).
I don't disagree with that at all, and by 'free' I suppose I didn't even mean 'as in free beer', I just meant there was no financial transaction taking place.
Maybe at some point we're really gonna see an upfront-micropayment structure as some people have mused about.