In 2016 the EU adopted GDPR, in 2018 it came into effect. Simply put, GDPR states that people own their personal data, such as their interests, health data, and other metadata about their person. It also gives a person the right to deny this data to any company and GDPR states that companies may not deny service to a person that refuses to give up personal data. For us—the users—this is awesome! Remember when Meta (back then Facebook) profiled its users—including teenagers—and sold the data to companies that used it to target individuals with political ads and hyper personalized product suggestions? GDPR made that kind of practice a lot harder.

Around 2020, more and more websites began to put up cookie banner paywalls that no longer allowed visitors to view the website if they denied sharing their personal data, unless they paid for access. Privacy officers from the EU have repeatedly argued that this practice is GDPR compliant, more on that later. At this point, its become such a common practice that GDPR has practically become irrelevant for most journalistic websites at this point. The willingness to pay for poor to mediocre SEO bait content is fairly low—basically zero. The sites simply sign a DPA (data processing agreement) with thousands of partners, people click the banners away by simply agreeing and the data-sharing happens just like it did before 2018—the only difference: more red tape.

I promised more, here it is: Simply put, giving visitors a choice between paying with their personal data or with money is considered fair, according to some privacy officers, because publications cannot be expected to offer their work for free. Sounds reasonable. website providers are allowed to offer their content in return for payment, accepting personal data as payment and treating it in accordance with GDPR, is at least honest.

A misconception that is sometimes mentioned (for example here) is that its also OK because visitors can just go somewhere else and get the same information. However, the official statements linked in said article, do not mention anything related to that argument.

But what about the hypocrisy? Well, I started out writing this blog post pretty miffed about the increasing number of “pay with your data or money”-paywalls. I was annoyed that some websites were allowed to force me to pay in order to preserve my privacy. Now I have to admit that none of those websites are under any obligation to provide their services for free, and giving me a choice to pay with money or my data is—at least in some ways—an improvement over paying with my data and having no other choice.

I have to concede that what I wanted (free access with no ads) is unreasonable. I still don’t like it.

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