[borzi]

Absolutely crazy interpretation:

"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.

[Nextgrid]

The law says that personal data is not a valid form of payment. Businesses have to adjust their business models accordingly.

[preisschild]

Prostitution is legal here in austria (where derStandard is based) and germany

Why should selling your personal data be illegal?

[mytailorisrich]

Isn't offering paid access exactly that? Or what do you have in mind?

[yladiz]

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.

[bombcar]

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.

[Ukv]

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.

[mytailorisrich]

You're repeating a claim that is widespread but that appears nowhere in the GDPR.

[mytailorisrich]

"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.

[yladiz]

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.

[mytailorisrich]

I was taking data from the OP's quote: "However, "pay or okay" gets 99.9% of users to agree to online tracking.". Anyway that's nitpicking as whatever the exact number it is the vast majority.

> My understanding is that it is illegal to do what’s here (not just in Austria but in the GDPR directly),

That's exactly my point. The GDPR does not say that it is illegal. It says that people must have a genuine choice, "genuine" meaning free of coercion. Now, "accept or be fired", "accept or you can't have surgery" are obviously not genuine choices. But arguing that "accept or you need to pay to access this news website" is the same and not a genuine choice is almost pushing the interpretation ad absurdum (what are genuine choices, then?), hence my previous comment.

> We wouldn’t even be having this discussion if these companies just put ads without tracking/selling user data, which, as mentioned, is fine.

The real world never so simple. In the real world if they don't "just" do that it is probably because it isn't working commercially.

[watwut]

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.

[account42]

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.

[strogonoff]

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.