Published on: February 23, 2021
Dutch DPA made it clear that cookie walls don’t comply with GDPR. But obviously pay walls will comply with GDPR because law can’t decide the price for your content or force you to provide it to everyone for free or else sites like Netflix, premium Question-Answer & consultancy services won’t be GDPR compliant.
Why cookie walls don’t comply?
This is because cookie walling the site is the simplest method to bypass cookie consent law. No developer would want to implement something complex and when they could simply block the page with a big ALLOW COOKIES button.
What about cookie walls in disguise of free trial walls?
Think about it. A site asks your to pay for content or view the page for free for this time by activating a free trial instantly. Of course, anyone would click the free trial button to skip the nag page.
Why do we need cookie consent?
To stay legal! But below is what a developer would say:
Why don’t we just use incognito mode and close it after we are done with web browsing? The cookie nags are getting bigger and annoying. Every site has them and it makes no sense to me because one can always disable cookies by navigating to chrome://settings/cookies?search=cookie and choosing “Block all cookies”. This is why we made those settings in the first place. Use them and thank us later.
– A coffeeholic chromium developer
#NotLegalAdvice
Images: Wall from FlatIcon, Tea from Wikipedia/Darjeeling Tea