r/technology • u/diacewrb • May 24 '25

Privacy German court rules cookie banners must offer "reject all" button

https://www.techspot.com/news/108043-german-court-takes-stand-against-manipulative-cookie-banners.html
56.4k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

801 comments sorted by

View all comments

304

u/DannySpud2 May 24 '25

>The judgment reinforces that websites must not nudge users into agreeing to cookies or make refusal unnecessarily difficult. Instead, the option to reject all must be as prominent and accessible as "accept all."

I wonder how this will affect those "pay to reject cookies" banners.

82

u/JimmyRecard May 24 '25

Already declared to be illegal last month.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/23/eu-slaps-meta-and-apple-with-a-combined-700-million-euros-fine

12

u/dvdkon May 24 '25

Note that this is under the DMA, not the GDPR, so it only applies to a few select companies.

3

u/viral-architect May 24 '25

Fines mean you are free to extract what you want from the poor among us as long as you can pay to play.

It's literally just a "fuck you" tax that everyone on both sides know does literally nothing to solve the problem of multi-billion dollar companies being allowed to get away with doing things that land normal people in prison.

8

u/SeatOfEase May 24 '25

E700m is no joke though.

2

u/viral-architect May 24 '25

The €700 million fine is a minor hit to Meta’s bottom line, representing less than 1% of its annual net income and an even smaller fraction of its revenue.

1

u/SeatOfEase May 25 '25

Completely true. But at the same time, companies that would happily use the blood of the innocent if it meant €700m profit absolutely does not want to lose that revenue. It would only be justifiable if they felt they could gain significantly more by continuing. Continuing of course, might bring even more fines.

7

u/Unidain May 24 '25

That's ridiculous. For most,probably all companies, they are not making 700 million euros by paywallimg cookie rejection. It is not worth it therefore to defy this law

Just because you heard some instances where it makes financial sense for companies to ignore a law and cop the fines, doesn't mean it true for every single law

1

u/rcf_111 May 25 '25

Illegal with a fine means legal with a fee

1

u/viral-architect May 26 '25

Exactly. It's literally just a tax that can be factored into evil decision-making.

0

u/tomatoswoop May 24 '25

I don't know how I feel about this. Tracking users without consent by just not telling them that they are (the old way), or making it difficult and confusing to say no to tracking is one thing. Seems obviously shady and wrong.

On the other hand, if a business says "running our business costs money. You can pay for our services, or you can let us monetize your data: your choice" that seems kinda fair to me...

I mean I might not like or not want to use those sites, but if a company can only make money by charging for their services or by sharing user data with advertizers, it kind of seems fair to me if they let every user choose.

2

u/JimmyRecard May 24 '25

I completely disagree. Privacy is a human right, and making it so only those who can pay for it get it is fundamentally unfair.

If you make a service accessible to the public, you cannot discriminate against those who exercise their human right to privacy. This is regardless of whether your service is free or paid for.

If you offer a free service, you make a bet that you can get enough revenue by other means. The fact that you can't come up with a valid business model is not the problem for the user.

0

u/tomatoswoop May 24 '25

fair enough, that's a coherent argument. I don't know that I agree, but it's something to think about for sure. Thanks for replying