More UK news publishers are adopting 'consent or pay' advertising model
"Sixteen of the 50 biggest news websites in the UK are now using a “consent or pay” model to allow users to pay to reject personalised advertising or even avoid ads altogether." It should be illegal.
[Charlotte Tobitt in Press Gazette]
This seems bad. Sixteen of the largest news websites in the UK are now charging users if they want to reject cookies.
“More publishers have begun to implement consent or pay this year after the ICO clarified that the model was acceptable as long as users are given a “realistic choice”, including by not putting the price too high.”
Charging for privacy — the so-called “consent or pay” or “pay or okay” strategy — is a predatory business practice. As the article notes, once a website switches to this model, almost 100% of readers choose to accept the cookie, which is mostly an indictment of how little people actually want to pay for the content they’re reading, as well as the low premium people put on their own privacy.
In the EU, this is illegal under the GDPR if a user isn’t able to make a freely-given choice that centers on actual features or capabilities. It should be: a world where privacy and security are things you pay for is one where you have a privileged class of people whose digital human rights are protected because they can pay, and a class of people whose rights are not protected because they can’t. Not only is it immoral, it sets a precedent of insecure and invasive as a default on the web, and that shouldn’t be acceptable to any of us.
[Link]
