The privacy of users seems less and less important and more so now that they can start charging you for rejecting cookies on a web page. Paywalls may already be familiar to you, and it is one of the measures that have been taking place for some years in different online media so that those who want to read a piece of news, for example, have to pay to access the full content.
Well, this problem can be another stone in the road for those users who want to browse different web pages and reject cookies. More than anything, because in some European countries we will not only find paywalls to read news, but by the new method that they have called ” the cookie paywall” or “cookie paywalls”.
Refusing cookies can be expensive
There are many websites, and more and more, that force us to accept or reject a series of cookies as soon as we enter them. They even force us to accept at least some ” necessary cookies ” and, if not, we will not have the option of being able to see the video, news or what, at that moment, we wanted to see.
However, this will be another level, since the simple fact of surfing the net and canceling that they can obtain this data from our uses can be very expensive . In addition to that, the incognito mode will not be able to save you this time. Even, it is more or less known what it will cost us to continue maintaining our privacy, specifically, around 75 euros a year for not accepting cookies .
Although this new method has not yet spread, the truth is that the future for users does not look very encouraging. More than anything, because, despite the few websites that have opted for this method, up to 13 popular news portals in Austria and Germany have been registered that have opted for this alternative.
everything to make money
As experts, such as Cristiana Santos, warn, cookie paywalls have been launched with a single objective: ” they are paid (websites) with data or they are paid with money ” . That is, it is a ” win or win ” for those pages that are implementing this new method on their websites.
Despite the fact that we find ourselves with the General Data Protection Regulation , the most extensive privacy law in all of Europe, in which it is stipulated that companies have the consent of users before collecting and processing their data, it is stipulated also that consent is ” freely given “. For what freedom of interpretation is given and, it is right here, what has been taken advantage of to earn money yes or yes.
For example, those in charge of regulating precisely this in countries like Austria or France have ruled that this cookie paywall model is not illegal . And, so far, the European Data Protection Board, which is in charge of supervising how this law is applied in the European Union, has not intervened. So, we still have to wait if they are implemented on websites in Spain and if this new method is regulated, which consists of paying to reject cookies.