Most of the big German news sites require you to either accept ads, or pay for a subscription.

It is sadly perfectly legal afaik. Nobody is entitled to your content without agreeing to some terms. Luckily, archive.is works very well. Wish there were more alternatives.

I also read that it's legal, but can't see how it's in the spirit of the law.

Non-targeted ads are fine from a privacy perspective/GDPR

How do they make you accept ads? Do they sniff ad blockers or something? And is this “ads or pay” dichotomy related to cookie modals?

Enter free: Accept ads. Don’t want ads? Buy pro.

You basically cannot enter if you don’t agree or have payed.

Example: https://t3n.de

Interestingly, browsing to your example link with uBlock Origin blocking all javascript by default I get a page that looks like indexes to articles. Clicking on one gives me what appears to be the full article. As I can not read German, I pasted part of the text into google translate, and yes, it does appear to be the full article text.

So for at least that site, it appears that all of the 'protection' is provided by javascript, and if one does not allow the javascript to execute, one receives the article content. There also does not look to be much in the way of ads with the javascript blocked as well.

The site doesn't require that you accept the ads. It just uses dark patterns to make you accept tracking.

Horrible how people want to be compensated in some manner for their full time work...

Would be totally fine if they weren't indexed, linked and summarized in a way that makes them indistinguishable from open web pages, until you click on them.

Makes me wonder if creating a plugin that makes your browser pretend to be the Google indexing bot would give you secret access to all paysites?

Certainly at this point anybody serious about wanting to give Google special access through their paywall would allow based on the published IP blocks [1] and not an easily spoofed UA header

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

I remember the good old days when Google penalized sites for showing content to their crawler that wasn't available to normal users.

https://12ft.io works on some sites through pretending to be the google bot.

You can also access any site in the google cache with prepending "https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:", that will you show you the website like the google bot saw it.

For example github.com would become "https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%..."

It is still worth to try, but many sites already prevent this.

It just recently stopped working for Zeit.de articles. Seems like their paywall is now higher than 12 feet...

Compensate, sure, but not in the form of a 12 month subscription.

They could also show non-personalised ads, if that were their only goal

GDPR does not allow forcing you to get a consent by preventing you from using the service:

"Consent is presumed not to be freely given if it does not allow separate consent to be given to different personal data processing operations despite it being appropriate in the individual case, or if the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance."

Since GDPR clearly does not consider ad-tracking cookies as "necessary for the performance of service", this should be against the spirit of the law. I guess it's up for the BfDI and relevant state-level commissioners to prosecute this and I don't know what is their stance, but this type of behavior does not seem compliant.

Of course, there are many other types of non-compliant behavior. Most cookie banners out there make rejecting cookies harder than accepting, and there are many cookie walls that block you from accessing the site at all until you dismiss them. These are clearly non-compliant, but prevalent. Even oversized or disruptive banners that goad you to click "I Agree" in order to dismiss them, cannot be considered as "freely-given consent".

They aren't preventing you from using the service. You can consent to the cookies, or also choose to pay.

Which of course requires an account, which requires a cookie, which is then tied to your payment details, and therefore far less private than ads, but that's GDPR for you. A nonsensical law in which nobody involved thought anything through.

It's certainly legal to get you to accept advertising, or buy the service.

What they can't do is say "no tracking, no service".

I wish this were true. It’s not. Tracking can be seen as “legitimate interest” because the money earned from that is needed to run the service.

If we could turn tracking I to a banned way to earn money from free visitors, I think we’d all be better off. This is not how gdpr works today.

No, it cannot, that’s explicitly not what legitimate interest is about. If that’s the way it’s playing out in Germany then that’s sad, but that’s a problem with the national regulator. Other regulators are dropping the ball on enforcement so it doesn’t surprise me, but that is expressly not legitimate interest.

Legitimate interest is things like a legal requirement to maintain PII because of the services offered.

In Austria, there is an ongoing legal case [0] about the pay-or-ads-model. At least the Austrian DPA seems to not totally be ok with it.

[0]: https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-beginning-end

In Italy the privacy authority is looking into it as well [0], but they also said that at first look the "cookie wall" is "in principle" not incompatible with the GDPR.

[0]: https://www.garanteprivacy.it/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/d...

>It is sadly perfectly legal afaik.

No it isn't.