Posted by aquir 12/23/2025
It turns out, they aren’t - there is a ton of fine print and if you happen to qualify they “refund” you in miles
Both in the US and Europe, it’d be great if the government used some of their overreaching powers they use to pass laws to spy on us to also pass laws to protect us as consumers for products and services across the board
It would be a decent consolation prize
Sort of off topic here but lack of consumer protection AND shitty airlines across the world are both subjects that really trigger me (not really)
I don't love the dark patterns, but believe the CEO when he says they are basically traps that enable the low prices for the people that don't fall for them.
I don't know what to respond to this. Are you saying you're fine with other people falling for the dark patterns if that allows for a cheaper ticket for you?
Didn't pre-print out your ticket? 100 euro fine. Your bag is too large at the gate? Same thing.
It's the airline of Compound Interest- "He who understands it, earns it... he who doesn't... pays it"
An airline that isn't purely catered to the rich, but to those who are intelligent, knowledgeable, and don't mind the lack of frills. It's like an airline crafted for grad students.
I wonder how that works out for them.
I also wonder if the time is ripe for some company to disrupt advertising by simply doing what google did on launch in 2000.
Amusingly my voluntary subscription was just under the cut-off amount and I cancelled it as soon as this came in. I bought a subscription to The Economist instead.
When I called to cancel and gave my reason as the paywall, they were very confused, but I knew what I was doing.
The way regulation works in the EU is typically EU comes up with regulation for countries to implement, then they implement the laws via their national system, then everything is handled "locally". So just leaving the EU doesn't mean that all of those things just stop being active, you need to go through the process of removing the local laws before.
> The social media giant was fined €200 million in April for breaching the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) over the binary choice it gives EU users to either pay to access ad-free versions of the platforms or agree to being tracked and profiled for Meta’s ads.
> In a press statement, the Commission said the revised offer would give users an “effective choice” between consenting to their personal data being used to show them fully personalised ads or handing over less personal data and seeing “more limited personalised advertising”.
Seems like there will be a more nuanced choice available in January, than "pay us or we'll track you"
UK gov is too busy enforcing the death of anonymity online anyway.
I know it happens in other countries, but can you actually get away with this in a civilized and non-authoritarian country today? Eventually you're gonna have to do/say something about it, if people keep opening up new cases about it.
> ... or no one bothers to enforce them any more?
Which is strange, because why wouldn't the UK enforce UK law? There is no such thing as "EU-wide laws" as I previously explained, so again I'm not sure why other EU citizens are being pulled into context here, it literally doesn't matter.
If no one is enforcing UK law, then obviously that's bad, but on another level. I'm not sure what point you're trying to do here. For example, if a company today breaks GDPR and I want to report them, then I'm gonna be engaging with my local agencies for that, regardless of where the company is based, assuming I'm in a EU country. There is no "EU bureau" you report to, since the company is breaking your local laws, you report them to your local authorities.
As far as I can tell by the context, you don't quite grok how EU regulations are actually implemented in reality, which is why you keep bring up other EU citizens, but it really doesn't matter. When GDPR came into effect, it's because the countries themselves have written and implemented local laws in their countries that align with GDPR, there isn't one "GDPR-law" that is enforced by an EU entity across the entire union.
> An EU citizen may have grounds to complain if it's illegal in their jurisdiction, but to who?
If I'm in Italy, and a German company is breaking some Italian law, then I'm reporting them to the Italian authorities.
EU citizens would have reason to be concerned about this. It’s not clear how an EU citizen would deal with this nor is it clear this would even be prohibited since there have been some recent rulings that muddy this. Nor is it even clear there would be a UK response since certain kinds of analytics are fine under UK GDPR.
You’ve taken something very interesting and open to interpretation and reduced it down to circular arguments. That’s boring.
> > > Hmm the guardian has gone "accept tracking or subscribe".
> > I didn’t know you were allowed to do that with cookies.
> UK site. Not in the EU any more.
This is the initial context for me in this conversation. As I understand things, whether UK is in the EU or not, they can still have laws active in the country that were introduced while the UK was in the EU.
Then someone said:
> ... or no one bothers to enforce them any more?
Which I guess is where I lose track a bit of what the actual subject is. We're talking about UK laws, that they may or may not still have as active in the UK, but at that point I already suspect that they're talking about some "EU-wide laws" or similar instead, which for me muddy the waters.
> Who's going to open a case and where?
Then this appears, which has obvious answers; if you're a UK citizen and someone broke UK law, you report to UK authorities. If you're from $EU_COUNTRY, then you report it in $EU_COUNTRY.
If you're in $EU_COUNTRY and UK company breaks your national laws, same applies as for any non-EU country, you report it in $EU_COUNTRY.
Going back to the initial question, can The Guardian ask "let us track you, or pay to visit this website"? For entities covered by the DMA, the answer is clear: No (so Meta cannot do this, which is why they're changing it). Otherwise, the answer isn't so clear, yet.
Now I don't know what I'm being dismissive about, I feel like I did my best following how the subject seemingly changed across comments, but I can acknowledge I lost track of the initial questions, for that I apologize. I guess I loose track of the discussion as the questions seems to get less specific, rather than more specific.
You have the choice of not viewing the website.
But the EU posted a press release last year that they are investigating this, as it could breach the DMA. [1]
The Guardian doesn't fall under the DMA though.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...