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Comment by yafbum | Hacker News Reader

News outlets based in Europe routinely pull this cookie wall crap. I guess they get a pass for very very principled reasons and not just because they are based in Europe whereas Facebook isn't... /s

Banging Facebook over the head might make Facebook suffer, but it isn't going to create an alternative privacy-conscious social network, or even the incentives to the existence of such an alternative. It's just going to further add cost to a bunch of properties that might have once been dominant and hegemonic, but aren't anymore (hello tiktok) and destroy value that would otherwise have accrued, primarily, to advertisers whose ads now will be much more crappily targeted.

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The reason is that they are smaller and if you want to make an example to scare an industry into compliance it's better to go after big companies first. If Facebook gets dragged over the coals the smaller ones are next unless they adapt. This myth that only non-EU companies get pulled into court is nothing but propaganda, mostly spread by the poor, poor, US-based violators of privacy.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ has a list of enforcement actions, and low and behold, most of them are against EU companies.

(The country filter is for the fining entity, not the fined entity, just in case anyone thinks this doesn't include US companies at all)

I'm sure there's plenty of local enforcement, I'm just talking about my own cookie wall experience which is mostly happening when consuming Europe-based news outlets. I was really surprised to see that it was enabled by some national agencies which have explicitly okayed the cookie wall for such cases.

> The reason is that they are smaller and if you want to make an example to scare an industry into compliance it's better to go after big companies first.

They've had like five years of large European media companies doing this. That was the time to make an example out of someone, not hope that some even bigger company comes along.

The fact other companies do the same thing doesnt mean what Facebook is doing is OK. Probably nobody (yet) filed GDPR complaint about them.

Actually going after the big players is way how to set precedent. If Facebook will be allowed to do this then most likely everybody can.

At least in Germany, our DPAs okayed the news site behavior.

Still find it out as I thought you had to offer the same functionality/content whether they accept extra cookies or not

out = odd?

Here’s what the DPA conference had to say

https://datenschutzkonferenz-online.de/media/pm/DSK_Beschlus...

Deepl:

> Whether the payment option - e.g. a monthly subscription - is to be regarded as an equivalent alternative to consent to tracking depends in particular on whether users are offered equivalent access to the same service in return for a standard market fee. Equivalent access generally exists if the offers include the same service, at least in principle

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