8 ms·

> "pay or consent" advertising model, Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via see

by judge2020 1y ago

> "pay or consent" advertising model, Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?

tantalor 1y ago
It's not the ads you are consenting to, its the personal data collection and targeting. You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.
- cge 1y ago
  >You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective. This is always a bit frustrating to me, in that, if someone doesn't like personal data collection, they likely have enough blocked that the attempts at targeted advertisements are likely to be very ineffective. And even in spaces where there is little personal data available, online advertising still seems to desperately cling to targeting rather than context. I remember being struck by the contrast between the printed Times Literary Supplement, with advertisements for new book releases, conferences, cultural events, and so on, which all seem quite relevant to the audience, are often enjoyable and informative, and have directly motivated me to buy things, and the automated advertisements that were added to their podcast, for things like... a football-themed advertisement for a car dealership vaguely located near some rough geolocation of my IP address.
- troupo 1y ago
  > You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective. This is a lie that has been perpetuated for a very long time. 1. There's no definite proof they are much less effective 2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking?
  - judge2020 1y ago
    > 2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking? You're talking benefits to society and/or the consumer; the only thing that matters is (often short-term) profits.
    - troupo 1y ago
      "Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." Sadly, this comic lives rent-free in my head all the time
tremon 1y ago
No, the EU has made it illegal to extort payment before allowing people to opt-out of data collection or profiling.
- g-b-r 1y ago
  Except for newspapers
  - kzrdude 1y ago
    right, that seems to be the model for German newspapers online, haven't seen it other places.
    - g-b-r 1y ago
      It seems to have become common at least in several European countries
- tantalor 1y ago
  Extortion is a stretch. Nobody is being forced to use these services.
  - buzzy_hacker 1y ago
    Tell that to the embedded Facebook trackers ubiquitous throughout the web
    - arkh 1y ago
      > embedded Facebook trackers And most social trackers and google analytics, and adsense, and most captcha alternatives or stripe anti fraud scripts. People have sold their audience to FAANG for 2 decades now. And let's not think too much about the Android and iOS ecosystems (phone, TV, "assistants" etc.).
  - lucb1e 1y ago
    Try not using Wechat in China. Facebook's Whatsapp is going in that direction in the Netherlands and probably other European countries: I don't yet need it for daily life, but a lot of services are moving to supporting WhatsApp and turning off things like regular phone support, website chat, etc. The only things where it was a requirement so far, were things I didn't yet care about (like sending in voice messages to be used in a podcast, or being part of the neighborhood gossip and tool-sharing community chat) but I bet it won't stay that way forever and sooner or later a company will discontinue email support in favor of "just message us on Whatsapp". Between going back to the 80s and writing/printing letters and sending them in the mail, and installing WhatsApp, any reasonable person will begrudgingly click that agree button no matter if they really agree. I'd say they were extorted at that point and it is not voluntarily/freely given consent, even if they technically have made that choice themselves
jdlshore 1y ago
Under the GDPR, it’s illegal to treat PII like currency. You can’t gate a service behind PII consent.
- jobs_throwaway 1y ago
  Whack. Let consumers and sellers decide what to do with their own data
  - xvector 1y ago
    This is a totally foreign idea to the EU. Offensive and crass, even. There's something I've learnt from some time in the EU. There is not an innovative, risk-taking, freedom-loving bone in the EU culture -- they exported all those folks to the US. Their homegrown risk takers and innovators inevitably leave because of their suffocating culture around innovation, entrepreneurship, and progress. This is one of the reasons for the staggering amount of brain drain in the EU. Most ironically, they sneer on our concept of entrepreneurship/innovation while they lag development by decades and having total and complete dependence on our technology. It is this weird moral high-horse position that amounts to a tactical foot-gun.
    - immibis 1y ago
      or maybe they just don't think automated mass surveillance is a worthwhile innovation. Like the atom bomb, you know - you shouldn't get to drop one in the middle of the city just because you invented it. Not even if it's very profitable.
      - xvector 1y ago
        The atom bomb ushered an unprecedented era of peace between nuclear armed countries. The number of men dying or getting wounded in war as a percentage of population has gone down dramatically post-nuclear. Conventional meat-grinder warfare is all but over in nuclear countries, and we can probably thank it for not being sent to war ourselves. We also got atomic energy out of it which is cool.
SllX 1y ago
No. They just made it illegal for Meta specifically to do it, and they’re reserving judgment for anyone else on their hit list covered by the DMA. The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles despite the PR and the extra layers of indirection, it targets American and Chinese companies specifically because that’s what it was designed to do.
- phtrivier 1y ago
  Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.) > The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ? I can agree on some version of "not a neutral law" in that it is "objectively" targeted: the law makes a difference between smaller actors and bigger ones ("gatekeepers") (and it's not clear to me if the criterias (size, audience, revenues, etc...) are set in store, or arbitrary [1]). It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that. But I suspect the case here "Meta is offering you to pay, so that they don't have to respect your rights to privacy". I suspect it would be illegal for even the smaller data collectors. But IANAL. However, the "neutral principles" don't make sense. All laws are principled, except the laws of physics. In this case, yes, the "principle" is that personal data is something to be treated with care. As often, you can state that something is a "principle" when someone can have the opposite version. So the "opposite" version of this is that personal data is a commodity that can be sold at will. None of those version is neutrally "true" or "false". However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter. The shame is that it never was directly settled in a democratic debate - it's entirely the work of the legislative bodies of the EU, which, though elected and representative, are not exactly well know of famous. Maybe the debate is too technical to be popular. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_20_2349 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_... [2] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en#booking https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en#book...
  - 1y ago

> "pay or consent" advertising model, Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?

tantalor 1y ago

It's not the ads you are consenting to, its the personal data collection and targeting. You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.

cge 1y ago
>You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective. This is always a bit frustrating to me, in that, if someone doesn't like personal data collection, they likely have enough blocked that the attempts at targeted advertisements are likely to be very ineffective. And even in spaces where there is little personal data available, online advertising still seems to desperately cling to targeting rather than context. I remember being struck by the contrast between the printed Times Literary Supplement, with advertisements for new book releases, conferences, cultural events, and so on, which all seem quite relevant to the audience, are often enjoyable and informative, and have directly motivated me to buy things, and the automated advertisements that were added to their podcast, for things like... a football-themed advertisement for a car dealership vaguely located near some rough geolocation of my IP address.
troupo 1y ago
> You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective. This is a lie that has been perpetuated for a very long time. 1. There's no definite proof they are much less effective 2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking?
- judge2020 1y ago
  > 2. Even if they are less effective, is it a bad trade-off when weighed against life-long pervasive and invasive tracking? You're talking benefits to society and/or the consumer; the only thing that matters is (often short-term) profits.
  - troupo 1y ago
    "Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." Sadly, this comic lives rent-free in my head all the time

tremon 1y ago

No, the EU has made it illegal to extort payment before allowing people to opt-out of data collection or profiling.

g-b-r 1y ago
Except for newspapers
- kzrdude 1y ago
  right, that seems to be the model for German newspapers online, haven't seen it other places.
  - g-b-r 1y ago
    It seems to have become common at least in several European countries
tantalor 1y ago
Extortion is a stretch. Nobody is being forced to use these services.
- buzzy_hacker 1y ago
  Tell that to the embedded Facebook trackers ubiquitous throughout the web
  - arkh 1y ago
    > embedded Facebook trackers And most social trackers and google analytics, and adsense, and most captcha alternatives or stripe anti fraud scripts. People have sold their audience to FAANG for 2 decades now. And let's not think too much about the Android and iOS ecosystems (phone, TV, "assistants" etc.).
- lucb1e 1y ago
  Try not using Wechat in China. Facebook's Whatsapp is going in that direction in the Netherlands and probably other European countries: I don't yet need it for daily life, but a lot of services are moving to supporting WhatsApp and turning off things like regular phone support, website chat, etc. The only things where it was a requirement so far, were things I didn't yet care about (like sending in voice messages to be used in a podcast, or being part of the neighborhood gossip and tool-sharing community chat) but I bet it won't stay that way forever and sooner or later a company will discontinue email support in favor of "just message us on Whatsapp". Between going back to the 80s and writing/printing letters and sending them in the mail, and installing WhatsApp, any reasonable person will begrudgingly click that agree button no matter if they really agree. I'd say they were extorted at that point and it is not voluntarily/freely given consent, even if they technically have made that choice themselves

jdlshore 1y ago

Under the GDPR, it’s illegal to treat PII like currency. You can’t gate a service behind PII consent.

jobs_throwaway 1y ago
Whack. Let consumers and sellers decide what to do with their own data
- xvector 1y ago
  This is a totally foreign idea to the EU. Offensive and crass, even. There's something I've learnt from some time in the EU. There is not an innovative, risk-taking, freedom-loving bone in the EU culture -- they exported all those folks to the US. Their homegrown risk takers and innovators inevitably leave because of their suffocating culture around innovation, entrepreneurship, and progress. This is one of the reasons for the staggering amount of brain drain in the EU. Most ironically, they sneer on our concept of entrepreneurship/innovation while they lag development by decades and having total and complete dependence on our technology. It is this weird moral high-horse position that amounts to a tactical foot-gun.
  - immibis 1y ago
    or maybe they just don't think automated mass surveillance is a worthwhile innovation. Like the atom bomb, you know - you shouldn't get to drop one in the middle of the city just because you invented it. Not even if it's very profitable.
    - xvector 1y ago
      The atom bomb ushered an unprecedented era of peace between nuclear armed countries. The number of men dying or getting wounded in war as a percentage of population has gone down dramatically post-nuclear. Conventional meat-grinder warfare is all but over in nuclear countries, and we can probably thank it for not being sent to war ourselves. We also got atomic energy out of it which is cool.

SllX 1y ago

No. They just made it illegal for Meta specifically to do it, and they’re reserving judgment for anyone else on their hit list covered by the DMA. The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles despite the PR and the extra layers of indirection, it targets American and Chinese companies specifically because that’s what it was designed to do.

phtrivier 1y ago
Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.) > The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ? I can agree on some version of "not a neutral law" in that it is "objectively" targeted: the law makes a difference between smaller actors and bigger ones ("gatekeepers") (and it's not clear to me if the criterias (size, audience, revenues, etc...) are set in store, or arbitrary [1]). It happens that they're all from the US except TikTok's ByteDance and Booking.com. It was probably _designed_ for that. But I suspect the case here "Meta is offering you to pay, so that they don't have to respect your rights to privacy". I suspect it would be illegal for even the smaller data collectors. But IANAL. However, the "neutral principles" don't make sense. All laws are principled, except the laws of physics. In this case, yes, the "principle" is that personal data is something to be treated with care. As often, you can state that something is a "principle" when someone can have the opposite version. So the "opposite" version of this is that personal data is a commodity that can be sold at will. None of those version is neutrally "true" or "false". However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter. The shame is that it never was directly settled in a democratic debate - it's entirely the work of the legislative bodies of the EU, which, though elected and representative, are not exactly well know of famous. Maybe the debate is too technical to be popular. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_20_2349 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_... [2] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en#booking https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en#book...
- 1y ago