Amusingly my voluntary subscription was just under the cut-off amount and I cancelled it as soon as this came in. I bought a subscription to The Economist instead.
Did they really already get rid of all the laws EU enforced upon them before they left? One would think it'd take a decade at least, but I guess things can move fast when the government really wants to.
The way regulation works in the EU is typically EU comes up with regulation for countries to implement, then they implement the laws via their national system, then everything is handled "locally". So just leaving the EU doesn't mean that all of those things just stop being active, you need to go through the process of removing the local laws before.
Well, I think Meta was the first to give it a try, and given that they had to revise it to not be like that (these changes incoming in January it seems https://www.euractiv.com/news/meta-to-tweak-its-pay-or-conse...), it seems to not be much of a gray area anymore, otherwise Facebook would continue offering that choice to users.
> The social media giant was fined €200 million in April for breaching the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) over the binary choice it gives EU users to either pay to access ad-free versions of the platforms or agree to being tracked and profiled for Meta’s ads.
> In a press statement, the Commission said the revised offer would give users an “effective choice” between consenting to their personal data being used to show them fully personalised ads or handing over less personal data and seeing “more limited personalised advertising”.
Seems like there will be a more nuanced choice available in January, than "pay us or we'll track you"
I know it happens in other countries, but can you actually get away with this in a civilized and non-authoritarian country today? Eventually you're gonna have to do/say something about it, if people keep opening up new cases about it.
Who's going to open a case and where? Is there any point in complaining to a local authority in an EU country about an UK web site? Esp since the guardian probably has zero business presence on the continent...
If you're a UK citizen, and you see UK law being broken you report that to your local authorities. I'm not sure where other EU countries come into the context?
In the context of this thread where I'm hypothesising that it's either legal or not enforced in the UK. An EU citizen may have grounds to complain if it's illegal in their jurisdiction, but to who?
Which is strange, because why wouldn't the UK enforce UK law? There is no such thing as "EU-wide laws" as I previously explained, so again I'm not sure why other EU citizens are being pulled into context here, it literally doesn't matter.
If no one is enforcing UK law, then obviously that's bad, but on another level. I'm not sure what point you're trying to do here. For example, if a company today breaks GDPR and I want to report them, then I'm gonna be engaging with my local agencies for that, regardless of where the company is based, assuming I'm in a EU country. There is no "EU bureau" you report to, since the company is breaking your local laws, you report them to your local authorities.
As far as I can tell by the context, you don't quite grok how EU regulations are actually implemented in reality, which is why you keep bring up other EU citizens, but it really doesn't matter. When GDPR came into effect, it's because the countries themselves have written and implemented local laws in their countries that align with GDPR, there isn't one "GDPR-law" that is enforced by an EU entity across the entire union.
> An EU citizen may have grounds to complain if it's illegal in their jurisdiction, but to who?
If I'm in Italy, and a German company is breaking some Italian law, then I'm reporting them to the Italian authorities.
I can’t figure out why you’re being simultaneously argumentative and dismissive. But you’re being argumentative and dismissive while talking about a totally different subject than the person you’re replying to.
EU citizens would have reason to be concerned about this. It’s not clear how an EU citizen would deal with this nor is it clear this would even be prohibited since there have been some recent rulings that muddy this. Nor is it even clear there would be a UK response since certain kinds of analytics are fine under UK GDPR.
You’ve taken something very interesting and open to interpretation and reduced it down to circular arguments. That’s boring.
I guess if I disagree it seems argumentative, not sure how to disagree without others believing it's argumentative, it kind of is by definition. It isn't my intention. Regardless.
> > > Hmm the guardian has gone "accept tracking or subscribe".
> > I didn’t know you were allowed to do that with cookies.
> UK site. Not in the EU any more.
This is the initial context for me in this conversation. As I understand things, whether UK is in the EU or not, they can still have laws active in the country that were introduced while the UK was in the EU.
Then someone said:
> ... or no one bothers to enforce them any more?
Which I guess is where I lose track a bit of what the actual subject is. We're talking about UK laws, that they may or may not still have as active in the UK, but at that point I already suspect that they're talking about some "EU-wide laws" or similar instead, which for me muddy the waters.
> Who's going to open a case and where?
Then this appears, which has obvious answers; if you're a UK citizen and someone broke UK law, you report to UK authorities. If you're from $EU_COUNTRY, then you report it in $EU_COUNTRY.
If you're in $EU_COUNTRY and UK company breaks your national laws, same applies as for any non-EU country, you report it in $EU_COUNTRY.
Going back to the initial question, can The Guardian ask "let us track you, or pay to visit this website"? For entities covered by the DMA, the answer is clear: No (so Meta cannot do this, which is why they're changing it). Otherwise, the answer isn't so clear, yet.
Now I don't know what I'm being dismissive about, I feel like I did my best following how the subject seemingly changed across comments, but I can acknowledge I lost track of the initial questions, for that I apologize. I guess I loose track of the discussion as the questions seems to get less specific, rather than more specific.
That's non-compliant with GDPR. When shown to EU readers, they cannot block access based on accepting a privacy policy. Only essential cookies that really are needed for it to function are required.
