Two are better than one?! Profil.at strikes back with forced banner, when users make the "wrong" choice.
Today, noyb.eu filed a GDPR complaint against the Austrian news magazine Profil. If you want to visit profil.at, you can reject all cookies in the first step. If one does so, however, a second banner pops up where one must agree to Google and other tracking cookies. Such forced consent is clearly prohibited under the GDPR.
Forced consent in two acts. Anyone who wants to read an article on profil.at and reject cookies, faces an impossible task: at first glance, profil.at obtains consent for tracking cookies. However, if you reject these, you are forced to agree to cookies from Google and ÖWA (Austrian Web Analysis) in a second step, because "only in this way can the platform be operated in a meaningful way". Once agreed to, this consent can also not be revoked.
„Profil.at has a particularly shameless system where you first click through one banner, but if you choose 'wrong' you get a second banner with no options.“ – Marco Blocher, data protection lawyer bei noyb.eu
Multiple violations of the GDPR. Without consenting to personalized advertising and tracking, one cannot use profil.at; revoking consent is equally impossible. User consent is therefore neither free nor unambiguous and therefore invalid. The complaint is directed against the data processing by services such as "Google Advertising Products", "Google Tag Manager", "Google Analytics" (which have already been declared illegal), "ÖWA" and the data transfers within the group.
Other websites of the Kurier media group. The media group Kurier operates a large number of websites that use similar cookie banners. It is noticeable that the websites freizeit.at and film.at also enforce consent.
Update 10.8.2023: The DSB issued a decision against Profil.at. The authority agreed with noyb's complaint and gave the Austrian news website a deadline of 8 weeks to to adjust its cookie banner and resolve the above mentioned GDPR violations.
