The Digital Markets Act is here, and it is getting some use! The European Commission has announced it is launching several investigations into the large tech companies it is set to regulate.
The focus of one of the Commission’s investigations is the “pay or consent” framework that Meta is touting. This framework aims to cover revenue losses from excessively collected targeted advertising data. It gives users a ‘choice’: either consent to cookie usage or pay to exercise their digital rights and decline cookie usage.
Looking at this model from a data protection standpoint, how the Commission oversees the “pay or consent” model will be of key interest. My biggest concern is the potential impact of imposing financial penalties on individuals who want to express their rights, particularly those who are less well off. Paying a fee to decline cookie use when visiting a site funnels people into just accepting cookies.
I struggle to understand how this model is compliant with the GDPR, as imposing monetary penalties for rejecting website cookies may run counter to Article 7(4) of the GDPR, which stipulates that consent must be freely given. Consent cannot reasonably be perceived as freely given if declining to consent comes at a cost.
Even the ePrivacy Directive refers to the definition of consent used in the 1995 Data Protection Directive Article 2(f), which defines consent as “a freely given specific and informed indication of his wishes by which the data subject signifies his agreement to personal data relating to him being processed.”
Link to the Commission press release: https://lnkd.in/erknChqM.