Having to pay to block cookies?

I noticed this recently when I accidentally clicked on links for some of the crappy news sites like The Sun but just clicked on a link for The Independent and it popped up there.

Telling me I can browse the site with ads and cookies, but if I don’t want ads and cookies I have to pay.

I’m assuming bundling the cookies with the ads is a way to get round the law about websites having to give you the option to decline cookies but this feels very shady?

Started in Spain, unsurprisingly it quickly caught on.

You have the option to leave, other options may be available but I’ve not looked into it.

I just close the site, I’m a firm believer in “fight bastard with bastard” and there’s precious little I want to read that badly which can’t be had elsewhere.

Connecting from a non-GDPR country may dodge it, try a VPN into the US if you care sufficiently. Laundering it via archive.is sometimes works to bypass nagware paywalls if the page is old enough.

Oh, see also 12ft.io

The ‘dodge’ is something called legitimate interest.

On some of the media sites the big pop up comes and theres and accept all/reject all option. So you click reject all. but however if you click on the legitimate interest section, you find all the ad companies cookies are there and you either have to turn off each individual one, of which there are hundreds, this being obviously the way to make people so fed up they just allow them, or on better sites you can reject the legitimate cookies as well.

Clearly an underhanded practise and a loophole that appears to have been initiated after the law came in.Sneaky barstards

So the law needs to be updated to allow people to reject everything with a single click.

‘Cos I get most of the stuff I’m interested in via Flipboard, many news sites are paywalled, but some give you x number of free reads per month, some are absolutely slathered in popups or floating ads that obscure chunks of text, and some ask for donations but allow full access. Paywalled sites can do one, some I’ll allow cookies if their content sits within my tolerance levels, any that make life difficult just trying to read the main text get dumped. As Cougar2 said “there’s precious little I want to read that badly which can’t be had elsewhere.”

Exactly! Satan will be hosting the Winter Olympics before I pay to not get cookies.

On some of the media sites the big pop up comes and theres and accept all/reject all option. So you click reject all. but however if you click on the legitimate interest section, you find all the ad companies cookies are there and you either have to turn off each individual one, of which there are hundreds, this being obviously the way to make people so fed up they just allow them, or on better sites you can reject the legitimate cookies as well.

Ahem…..see the legitimate interest cookies under vender list on this site, mark has explained why and I sympathise with him but I still untick all 370ish of them when the cookies pop up message appears every Saturday

If another website I visit has the similar cookies consent window as this site I don’t bother with the website.

Oh, see also 12ft.io

Very much this /\ /\ /\

The ‘dodge’ is something called legitimate interest.

I blogged about this. https://blueteamhackers.com/illegitimate-consent/

FWIW, Safari private tabs don’t share cookies between separate tabs and dump the cookies when you close the tab. This is how I do most of my browsing, as well as rejecting cookies and objecting to legitimate interests. The amount of data being sold on us is already beyond creepy, with people happy to give shady companies the kind of knowledge most would never trust a state with.

Using consent-o-matic to fill in all the GDPR consent stuff means I can now longer login to linkedin, as those cookie setting apparently classify me as a child, again I thing this is a sneaky (scam) way to get users to opt out of GDPR protection.

In a similar vein, my LG smart television won’t let me use the smart features unless I agree to my data being processed outside the GDPR zone. I mean WTF, how can it be legal to sell a television that forces you to opt out of a legislative framework designed to protect me?

IMO privacy and data protection needs to become a much more important political topic.

Is CookieAutoDelete / SelfDestructingCookies still a thing? I mean, is it still usable, and does it serve us? I used to use it religiously, but at some point in the past five years gave up worrying about this stuff as, like has been said, well, I got lazy and it was too much effort to stay on top of. Used to use NoScript religiously a long time ago too, but once pretty much every website had assets & code spread across multiple domains that became too complex to try and navigate.

It’s taken me  20 mins to opt out of the literally hundreds of cookies in the vendor list on this site. Then I had to do it again on my phone, I gave up in the end but that’s the intended course of action I suppose. Very sneaky and underhand if you ask me. You ought to be able to just click one box to opt out. I’m not amused.

As a full member none of those vendor cookies get near you. Logged in full members bypass the ads and the cookies that go with them.

Good to know, thanks, pleased I didn’t bother to do any other devices in that case!