I tried to visit the website and a pop-up appeared trying to get my consent re. tracking. Since I didn't agree, the website denied access displaying this page:
https://anon.healthline.com/
I believe NPR also uses the same tactics. How is this legal under GDPR?
In any case, I just disabled JS and read the article as usual. Moreover, I realized the web (the document part, not the apps part) is actually so much better without JS. Honestly, whenever JS is being used, it's almost exclusively against the user, not to help them. This is from someone who is coding in JS for a living.
I've been using Cookie AutoDelete[1] (Chrome Extension). This way I can happily 'agree' to all of these popups that are the new scourge of the internet, knowing that any Cookies they do set get auto deleted from my browser 15 seconds after I close the offending tab. You have to train it by white-listing the domains you want to keep cookies for (like *.ycombinator.com) but once that's done it just does its job, and I can surf knowing that I'm not being tracked (well, not as heavily as I would be NOT using it).
The argument is that they need to do this particular tracking in order to make their website work.
I believe this is against the GDPR, but need to make a complaint against them.
Arguments why it is against the GDPR, if you can display the text to a googlebot and you will do no change to the structure of the document that is the main purpose of coming to the site then it is not GDPR compliant to deny someone access to the resource based on the argument that they need to do tracking to make the particular resource work.
In other words they are quite clearly lying and should be fined.
There should be some general make GDPR complaint tool where people can go, say where they are from, write what site complaining about, and it shows you similar complaints for you to add yourself to, or to send a new complaint. Then it packs them off to the relevant organizations to handle the complaint. Probably someone has already made this tool but I don't know about it.
It's not compliant at all, but we'll have to wait for these practices to actually get punished (severely, one can only hope) before people will actually get it through their skulls that it's important to respect your users.
Regarding the JS, I have come to the same conclusion. On a large amount of news websites, I have everything blocked (CSS too) with some element hiding rules to remove the strange menus and whatnot. The content you care about on such a site is the text, with maybe one picture. Almost nothing is lost by refusing everything else.
