I happen to think it is, and indeed the GDPR sees it the same way. For EU residents. They have to delete your data if you ask them to, no special form requirements.

I may have forgotten my password, they may require additional personal data to let me log in again (which is why my PayPal account is still not deleted) their shitty page might be not loading in my browser of choice, or they recently decided I may not visit it with an ad blocker. It’s just a hoop to jump through to try and make people sigh and just not bother. In OP’s case they want to avoid additional third party tracking on the site, and that’s 100% valid.

If GDPR only protects people with EU passports, then it’s not universal rights - it’s privilege with a privacy logo.

And what do you think would happen if EU tried to enforce their laws in an interaction between two parties that both aren’t in the EU? If we did it, why shouldn’t any other country try and do the same? Better read up on Chinese law before you next do business with a company in, idk, France. Sound good?

It’s not about passports either. Move to Vienna or Prague and you may have better luck.

Apparently they did not delete their account because they don’t want to log in to do that.

Still, they obviously can’t know if the service in question would have treated an EU resident differently.

Not to my computer they don’t.

I legitimately do not, and have never had, any of the usual social media.

“Well that can’t be right. Highly suspicious. What do you have to hide?”

I use 2 8bitdo ultimate 2c wireless on my steam deck. Had to put the 2.4g dongles on short extension cables because of interference from the dock’s USB ports, after that they work flawlessly, both via 2.4g and via bluetooth.

If your friend is an EU citizen, they might have some luck with a GDPR request to delete all their data.

They also might not. Meta technically would have to comply, but there is no real way to know if they did.

Become unavailable on non-private messengers. Explain your reasons if asked, but stay stubborn. (And yes, it will turn out that a subset of people you know don’t give a shit about staying in contact with you.)

Nope. You cannot.

Of course they are. You can pay or consent to tracking.

You called bullshit on it being common on the continent, I provided examples from the continent.

At least one German outlet has been shown to still track you after paying. Just a bit less. So they use a rubber with a few holes poked in.

the user can simply choose not to read the article, so there’s an option where they don’t get fucked.

We are rapidly nearing a point where you can’t read online news from any major (ergo “widely considered somewhat credible”) source without one of those schemes. So I’d argue that the alternative is to just not get access to online news, and that may be considered too much pressure to still consider consent as voluntary.

Sadly, newspapers are not considered “platforms”. A platform is a site that publishes user generated content, so lemmy or facebook. And not all platforms are large platforms too.

So while this is a good first step, it doesn’t cover all online services.

www.spiegel.de

www.faz.net

www.sueddeutsche.de

www.heise.de

www.golem.de

www.derstandard.at

www.repubblica.it/

It’s not a grey area, it’s clearly illegal (consent has to be given voluntarily. If you can’t use the site without paying, that’s not voluntary). Agencies so far just decided to look the other way and play dumb. There are lawsuits ongoing.

German news outlets all do it. The data protection agencies have sadly so far ruled it’s ok (there are still ongoing lawsuits afaik).