Data protection or subscription? Criticism of cookie paywalls
The seven news offers are specifically spiegel.de, zeit.de, heise.de, faz.net, derstandard.at, krone.at and t-online.de, as Noyb reports. The organization also provides a reason for the data protection complaints, which – in the case of the German media – were submitted to the respective data protection officers of the federal states. Accordingly, the point is that readers on more and more websites are faced with the choice of either consenting to the data being passed on to tracking companies or taking out a subscription.
The crux: Users can, according to the Noyb criticism, not freely decide whether you consent to the data transfer, although this is actually provided for in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Instead, the alternative is to take out a subscription that costs “sometimes ten, twenty or a hundred times as much,” as Alan Dahi, data protection lawyer at Noyb, says. Noyb calculates that the data transfer from users: inside the pages brings a few cents, a subscription on the other hand a few dozen euros.
Noyb wants to take action against DSB decision
“You get the impression that this is not about a fair alternative to consent, but about selling expensive subscriptions”, so Dahi continue. According to Noyb, the fact that websites like the seven mentioned are increasingly using this “pay-or-okay” system could be due to a decision by the Austrian data protection authority (DSB) in 2019. She did not see any violation of the GDPR in this. Noyb: “However, this case was brought before the authorities by a layperson and is based on factually incorrect assumptions. Noyb is determined to reverse this decision. “
The Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard had pushed the development of the pure model and sees itself as a “pioneer in all of Europe in matters of data protection”. In any case, Standard Managing Director Alexander Mitteräcker does not see Noyb’s complaint as a reason to “question the product and the decisions of DSB”. For Noyb, by the way, the alternative to the model is that websites consistently advertise in compliance with data protection regulations, instead of “leaving the ‘leftover spaces’ to the advertising industry for a few cents “.
