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Not sure how long this has been a thing but I was surprised to see that you cannot view the content without either agreeing to all or paying to reject.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    A common thing in continental Europe too. NOYB and some EU lawmakers are trying to make these pay-or-ok schemes illegal, but I guess in the UK you will be out of luck regarding that.

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Wouldn’t this be blatantly in conflict with the EU cookie law? Like I’m not from Europe but my understanding was that it needs to be equally easy to accept or reject all cookies. Dark patterns aren’t allowed

    • digdilem@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      I think this type of scheme is illegal under the GDPR, which is in effect in the UK just as it is in the EU.

      It’s been a while since I worked with the GDPR, but from memory the wording is such that:

      The data holder needs to allow people to opt out of data collection. The subject can request to be forgotten. The data holder explicitly cannot charge for this.

      But changes move slow, and The Mirror is probably banking on nobody caring enough to complain, and Trading Standards being too underfunded and swamped with other work to investigate otherwise (which they are). If they’re challenged, they’ll just change tack, go “oops” and are unlikely to hit big fines unless they dig in.

      Cookie laws are a horrible mess and always have done - the resulting consent banners are far more intrusive than anyone wanted.

    • suction@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      That’s doubtful - you have examples? Because if the service is based in the EU I’ll send those to the appropriate agency today.

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    Lmao even if you pay, you still see ads, they just won’t track you. What an insane monetization scheme

    • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Actually they still track you, they just don’t share the information with advertisers. This is hte “pay or ok” model of blackmailing users to accept cookies and tracking. More or less what Facebook did last year, but Facebook charged a price tag that was higher than what Netflix costs! In the EU, this is not what was intended, and is currently being redefined

      https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2024/edpb-consent-or-pay-models-should-offer-real-choice_en

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        Absolutely wild that they’re still allowed to call this “consent”

        If we imagine the idea of sexual consent being given in the same circumstances, it sounds a lot like a fucking crime.

        “Either you consent to having sex with me right now or you pay me a subscription fee in order to not consent. If you do that, I’ll still fuck you, but I’ll use protection”

        • unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org
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          3 months ago

          I like this analogy; it’s provocative and it made me think about the issue for longer than I would have otherwise.

          However, after some thought, I don’t think it aligns perfectly since the user can simply choose not to read the article, so there’s an option where they don’t get fucked.

          In the same vein, I think we could make a better analogy to sexting. You meet someone, seem to hit it off, and when the texts and pictures get a little spicy, they hit you with a, “you can pay me now and I will keep all of this in my private spank-bank, otherwise I’m going to share our entire relationship with a group chat I’m in with 1200+ people”

          I think this is a bit stronger because it hits on a few notes where the hook-up analogy falls short: sharing of sensitive information, extortion in exchange for gratification, and the potential for an ongoing relationship.

          Idk, what do you think?

          • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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            3 months ago

            I see where you’re coming from, but my understanding is that the tracking cookies are already on your machine when the banner is presented, so they’ve already put in the proverbial tip.

          • Don_alForno@feddit.org
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            3 months ago

            the user can simply choose not to read the article, so there’s an option where they don’t get fucked.

            We are rapidly nearing a point where you can’t read online news from any major (ergo “widely considered somewhat credible”) source without one of those schemes. So I’d argue that the alternative is to just not get access to online news, and that may be considered too much pressure to still consider consent as voluntary.

      • Don_alForno@feddit.org
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        3 months ago

        Sadly, newspapers are not considered “platforms”. A platform is a site that publishes user generated content, so lemmy or facebook. And not all platforms are large platforms too.

        So while this is a good first step, it doesn’t cover all online services.

    • suction@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      “But if we don’t track you, we lose all the money we’d have made selling your data to Oxford Analytics so they can help Putin convince your uncle to vote for far-right candidates?!?”

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      They can always go shittier. Nothing will stop them until the entire human population is strapped into a matrix style ad network, 24/7… paid for by you, renting your neurons as compute for AI to generate more ads and supporting analytics for yourself… until your profitability quotient falls below average and they liquify your corpse to feed a more profitable gen of the attention crop.

  • peto (he/him)@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Just don’t read The Mirror. Generally not worth the effort of moving your eyes from one word to the next.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 months ago

    Refer them to the EU. EU is going after Meta for charging for an ad-free plan. Oh, right. The EU only goes after USA corporations and deliberately wrote their rules to exclude companies like Spotify. Oh wait, there was Brexit, so it doesn’t matter anyway. Brits voted themselves right to fucking shit. Kinda like what we might do in a few months.

    Vote. The stupid people definitely will, so it’s necessary to combat them.

    • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      And fuck abstaining on the basis of we only have two bad choices, I want a true leftist candidate. I would too, but by abstaining you are basically taking the bullshit liberal position of “I can’t tell the difference between these two things”

  • xia@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 months ago

    How can you pay to block cookies if they would need a cookie to remember that you paid?

  • twinnie@feddit.uk
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    3 months ago

    I’ve seen this on a few sites. They aren’t even allowed to make rejecting cookies more difficult than accepting them but right now the legal people are trying to educate before they starting enforcing these rules. I expect the lawyers at the Mirror know that this is illegal but think they can get away with it.

    All those things like having to “customise” your cookies to turn them all off, and “legitimate interest” is all illegal under the rules but they’re trying their luck.

  • SleepyWheel@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    The Mirror website is cancer. I use NoScript and it won’t load without allowing about 50 fuckkng scripts. MSN too. I avoid both but occasionally click on a link from elsewhere

  • CatZoomies@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Get yourself the Consent-o-Matic browser extension and watch these “we and our 8000 partners (hungrily) value your privacy” banners disappear.

    If you stumble upon a web site that Consent-o-Matic does not handle, you can simply click the extension, click “Submit for Review”, and the devs will shortly add support for that site.

      • CatZoomies@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Oof! I definitely can raise an Enhancement request in their GitHub to see if they can take on adding that functionality.

        If anyone can get me the exact link of whatever OP experienced, I can log it there.

        • riccardo@lemmy.ml
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          3 months ago

          if you need a consent-or-pay example, just open La Repubblica’s homepage. You will be prompted with the “accept all cookies or pay” prompt as soon as you open the site. Pretty standard practice for most Italian online newspapers, sadly

          • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
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            3 months ago

            Even UBO doesn’t work here. Zapping the element, just pops it back up. Crazy

            E: disabling js does seem to allow access to the site and articles, though you can’t interact with anything (comments and such).

    • moon@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      But does that auto accept cookies like many of these other anti cookie banner extensions?

      • CatZoomies@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        You can customize how the extension handles cookie banners. See an example of current settings on most updated extension at time of this comment:

    • Swarfega@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      uBlock Origin has two cookie filters that are disabled by default. I enabled that and ditched the consent-o-matic extension

  • ChonkaLoo@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Daily mail does it as well. Cancer. But not hard to circumvent with Firefox and some extensions.

  • Flyberius [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    GDPR, go gettem.

    You cannot share customer data with third parties without explicit consent. It has to be clearly labelled and not hidden in T&Cs

      • Flyberius [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        It’s still a uk thing. I was the GDPR officer for our company when it was introduced and as far as I know it hasn’t been repealed in UK law yet.

        Edit: Looking into it further it appears that we now have a UK GDPR law which is essentially the same thing and is in lockstep with the EU version.

      • communism@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        UK also has GDPR. They left the EU after GDPR was passed and now have “UK GDPR” which is practically the same as the EU

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 months ago

    FYI you should probably be blocking/whitelisting cookies client-side anyways. At the very least, disable third party cookies.