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Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

But the good part is you can just decline to consent. Because under GDPR if they need consent at all (that is they really don't need the data), then you can decline.

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> then you can decline.

Not if the consent form looks like this:

[Register] [Accept]

For it to be informed consent declining must, by law, be as easy as accepting. Yes, this is being widely violated, but that's just a problem of enforcement.

Can the site deny your access then?

Much like the few US-based news sites that already decided to just not bother and show me the "you're coming from the EU and we can't be bothered to not collect your data" blank page instead.

At which point I'm free to decide I wasn't interested in their content anyway.

Not legally. Personal data isn’t transactional.

afaik no, but you might lose some features

No. They consider that "coercion". So there really is no point in even asking, as the only correct answer is to decline. Anyone who accepts can be presumed to have been tricked into falsely thinking they would get something in exchange for granting permission.

They cannot coerce you to sign away your fundamental rights in exchange for service. If they cannot offer service without violating your rights, then the service is illegal in Europe.

Then the result will be that those services simply stop serving EU customers.

If legal offering for a market with half a billion people is not worth it for them, then by all means they can and probably should pull their criminal enterprise out of Europe. That just creates an opportunity for Europeans to say good riddance and perhaps start something new and worthwhile that isn't funded by exploitation.

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