Comment by wutbrodo
4 months ago
I may be missing something, but I don't see how this clearly precludes that behavior.
Which descriptor do you think is unambiguously violated by making it easier to provide consent than withhold it? To my eyes, both 'freely' and 'informed' are plausibly upheld.
It would be very straightforward to specify that consent and withholding must be equally accessible in the interface, instead of splitting hairs about definitions of "freely given". This is what people refer to when they say the law is poorly written
> Which descriptor do you think is unambiguously violated by making it easier to provide consent than withhold it?
> Art 7(3) It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent. [0]
But legal interpretation of GP I believe is reaching the consensus that that phrasing too is broken by that implementation:
> Free and informed consent (Art. 7 GDPR): Consent is valid only if it is freely given. When the option to decline is hidden or unnecessarily cumbersome, the user's choice is affected and consent is no longer "free." [1]
[0] https://gdpr.eu/article-7-how-to-get-consent-to-collect-pers...
[1] https://www.ictrechtswijzer.be/en/complaint-about-cookies-wi...
Ah appreciated, that is indeed exactly what I was asking about!
Now I'm left wondering why enforcement was supposedly so hard. Seems like shooting fish in a barrel, especially given that some very large websites were in clear violation of this article
Subjective take: Huge amount of small actors, and the big actors have a financial interest in shifting the conversation to blaming the EU for their annoying dark patterns over protecting customers from privacy violations and tracking to the detriment of their financials.