Was trying to read a news story and… What fresh shitfuckery is this? Why do I now have to pay money to a company just for the privilege of not being spied upon and not getting your cookies that I don’t want or need? How is this even legal?
RE: “Why are you even reading that shitrag?” – I clicked on a link someone posted in another sublemmit, didn’t realise it was the Sun till after. I do not read the Sun on the regular, chill. My point stands regardless that this is extremely shitty and should probably not be allowed.
How is this even legal?
Because Brits voted Brrrrexit?
We still have the UK implementation of GDPR. That didn’t go away when we left the EU.
We won’t have any changes to it that might have happened since brexit but we didn’t remove the law either.
This is a US website no?
It’s legal because the Sun is a private company and they have the right to charge you to not datamine you. It’s not a public service and they’re not the only source of news out there, so you have a choice: if you don’t like it, get your news elsewhere.
What’s the problem exactly?
I’m no fan of ads, but you’re right. Expecting everything for free with no ads is just greedy.
Give me all the ads you want but at least give me the option whether they’re personalised or not… Why is this now a paid choice? The companies get paid by the advertisers either way, right? I’m not expecting it for free but I don’t like thousands of unknown companies tracking me thank you very much.
They get paid more by the advertisers for delivering personalized ads.
Of course they do :/… Surely though, even with the previous free choice of general or personalised ads, I bet a decent few people still habitually clicked ‘accept all’, so I can’t imagine this making that much of a difference financially… And this way they’ll probably drive away some more privacy-savvy readers as well. Oh well, guess they wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t pay off for them.
I don’t mind ads, but I don’t expect to be tracked around the internet. It’s like every website you visit being able to view your browser history. That’s private information.
Technically, whatever the Sun prints is private information available for purchase. You can either pay cash or trade their information for yours.
I still get frustrated by it, so I understand where you’re coming from. My local paper is ONLY viewable with a subscription. There are ways around it, like turning off JavaScript, but if we don’t count cheating the system, you gotta pay. They have to make money to pay their employees somehow, at least the Sun gives you an alternate option.
Expecting everything for free with no ads is just greedy.
In this case you’re not paying to not have ads. You’ll still get ads; they just won’t be personalized.
Personalized ads are more valuable to advertisers, so it still makes sense for them to charge a bit for it, but it’s not something I’ve seen before.
I’m guessing they charge a decent amount more than the difference, though - and probably even more than they make from personalized ads per person. On that note, I really wish ad free subscriptions were closer to the revenue providers get from serving ads - if they were, I’d be more willing to pay for them than just running an adblocker all the time. YouTube Premium, for example, costs 14 USD monthly, but annual ad revenue per non premium user was 1.21 USD.
Visiting the Murdoch-owned Sun was your first mistake. Everything they do to you after that is your own fault.,
Might as well hand your credit card to the MyPillow Guy next and complain about how much money just got charged to your account from the nearest strip club.
private session by default and using start page as your search engine with Anonymous View to search the pages saves the cookies but they are worthless one you leave the site
Okay, but that’s still a lot of effort, and loads more effort than 90% of users would be willing to go through. All so these fucks can (try to) sell my data to 19000 different ‘vendors’ and their ‘legitimate interests’. I swear this needs to be legally regulated somehow before we end up having to pay these people to not monitor our webcams while we read their shitty tabloids.
BTW I do use searXNG and Startpage
If you’re on Firefox, you can also have certain sites automatically open in containers. “Sure, put cookies on my machine if you want. You can see me only browsing your website ever.”
That’s the solution I’ve landed on for using Youtube, since Invidious and Piped always cack the bed for me. I’ve deleted my old Google account and started a new one with a fake email address, too.
Good strategy for dealing with them. Reminds me that on the Hacker News article about the Internet Archive hack, a couple of commenters reported on whether they found their email addresses in the leak. They called them their “unique-to-archive.org email addresses.”
The more we compartmentalize, the better off we are, I think.
Containers are great.
What do you think - cookie autodelete sound a little more private? “If you can’t fingerprint my browser, this might as well be my first visit to this website“
What new level of hell is this?
How is that not extortion?
Because you aren’t compelled to use their site.
It’s the Sun. No one should use their site. They’re doing you a favour by showing you they’re assholes the second you land on their site.
True, but shouldn’t I be able to use it if I want to without having to choose between paying money or being spied on?
The only other option I can see would be ads – but I’m betting you’d just use an ad-blocker.
Well, the fact that when there are ads, there’s always like 20 of them is another issue… But yeah, I don’t even care about ads but as I see it I should have a right to privacy without having to pay for it.
You don’t have to pay for privacy. You still have that right.
What you don’t have is the right to use that particular website without either paying for it, or allowing cookies.
You aren’t a victim of anything here.
You are part of the problem here
How so?
I mean, do you expect news to be free?
Either pay for it by selling your data or with money, or don’t use their website.
Why do I need to sell my data? Cant I just have ads?
the Sun would personally sell your organs if it could
And, though I don’t know about this one in particular, just because you pay not to have personalized ads, doesn’t mean you’re paying not to have your data tracked and sold by this company or to not have tracking cookies added to your browser by them that other sites can use to target ads to you.
It’s just that they won’t use the information they collect or buy or get from partners’ tracking cookies or advertising IDs already on your system to target the ads you see while on their site and logged in.
Solution: don’t read that shitrag. It was always a waste of paper, now it is a waste of bandwidth as well.
Not the f’n point
But a fair point nonetheless.
OP, The Sun is one of the trashiest rags on the face of this Earth. Your best option regardless of their ad practices was always to stay well away from them.
Oh I know, I clicked a link here on lemmy and was taken to that site. I never read it otherwise, but now Im definitely not reading it…
you can block websites if you want if you’re on voyager. It’ll filter out posts which link to whatever websites you list.
I use voyager and I love you for sharing this. fuck the s*n.
oh man that’s an incredible option. i was already super happy with the “share as image” option they have, but it seems like they just keep outdoing themselves
Radical approach, because I might miss the post with interesting comments, and people often provide alternative links or straight up embed summaries.
Oooh, good tip. Didn’t know about that feature.
I’m on Sync. I might have a look later.
I wouldn’t bother switching for a fewture like that. Just wanted to share incase you were on voyager.
Ooh you can share settings like this? Whoa…
One of the best Sync features. Long press on any setting to copy a link to your clipboard.
And they’re not even the worst in the UK.
I forget which one it was that decried the Brass Eye paedophile special as sick, while on the page directly opposite it was an article telling you how big 15 year old Charlotte Church’s tits were getting along with a photo.
Daily Mail?
Brass Eye was incredible for shining a light on media and political hysteria. Their episode on drugs was hilarious and tragic.
A naive question of mine, but isn’t using a browser/extensions that silently/transparently blocks cookies (such as Brave, but not just it) enough to fearlessly click “Accept All Cookies”, since ultimately they would be pointless for the purpose of tracking (due to the browser’s own cookie blocking capabilities)?
Yeah it would. But as I said elsewhere, this is probably enough to be ‘too much effort’ for the majority of users, and definitely a lot more effort than it should be. I already know several people who habitually click accept all on cookie banners, and I know I have caught myself doing that a couple times too…
Not any factor lotion will protect your mental health from “the Sun” o_O
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Just set up your browser to delete cookies on exit. If you want, just have it delete them from specifically that site. The entire debate over whether-or-not a site sets a cookie seems to me to be pretty pointless. If a site can set cookies, then some bad actor will. The dialogs that sites put up talking about it are pointless. No solution other than having your browser not retain them regardless of what a site wants to do is going to be a reliable solution. Not policies, not laws.
I have my browser delete all cookies on exit. I have a very short whitelist of sites that I permit to keep cookies and track me. Every one of those is one that I need to log in to use anyway – so I could be tracked with or without a cookie – and the only thing the cookie does is buys me not needing to log in every time, doesn’t have privacy implications.
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Paying doesn’t buy you anything unless they offer a no-log, no-data-mining policy. If you log in to use the site, then they can track you anyway via the credentials you use.
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They’re not imposing it on you. They’re offering you a service that costs them money. They give you news, you give them money or data. If you don’t want to do that deal, there’s a whole Internet out there. Don’t go to that particular site. There are lots of websites out there, many of which offer the same deal. Getting upset that somewhere on the Internet, someone is offering a deal that you don’t want seems pointless.
If you want to have some kind of tax-funded news site, go advocate for that. Yelling at them isn’t going to get you there.
If you want to just view news done by volunteers, something like WikiNews, then go visit those sites instead. Maybe contribute work as well. I don’t think that volunteer news is going to realistically compete with commercial news, but hey, there was also a point when people thought the same thing about volunteer-run encyclopedias, so maybe it’ll get there.
I’ll also add that I’m going to be generous to the EU and assume that the goal of their “cookie warning” law, which is why many European websites show these, was to raise awareness of cookies and privacy implications by having warnings plastered all over, so that it starts people thinking about privacy. Because if the goal was actually to let people avoid cookies, then it is costly, disruptive and wildly ineffectual compared to just setting a setting in the browser, makes actually having the browser delete cookies more-annoying, and duplicates a browser-side standard, P3P, that already accomplished something similar, and was just all around a really bad law.
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The red flag there in the screenshot shows you the name of the publication you should avoid using or visiting.
