A ‘Thank You!’ to BigBrotherAwards

Have you ever visited their site? Maybe you should…

I just read the BigBrotherAward 2019 in der Kategorie Verbraucherschutz (in German) which went to Zeit Online for their paywall which basically lets you choose to either pay with money or with your data – something that 75% of all online news magazines seem to do now as the article and speech said.

And yes, I’ve seen the same paywall at spiegel.de or heise.de – and no, that *is* not acceptable. If you click “yes, go on”, the heise guys for instance will send your data to >200 “partner” sites all over the globe – so I just asked a member of the EU commission if we can’t stop these practices, for instance with forcing them to add the option “yes to ads, but no to tracking”.

Maybe we should all say “no” instead, and boycott these data tracking sites? If they’d all lose their readers like the British “Times” which lost over 90% of their audience when using similar techniques, then maybe that would stop them… according to Wikipedia (search for something like “Paywall”), some US news magazines are already taking these trackers off…

Thanks to digitalcourage, DVD, ILMR, and CCC for supporting these BigBrotherAwards!

And to you, like always, thanks for reading.