The normal paid one (~£15 a month or £150 a year) is still fully ad-free, and can be (officially) shared with "a few friends and family". This looks like a new "pay less but have adverts" subscription option, which is obviously a bit shitty and questionable.
It's a bit pricey, but it's one of the few British news sources without a right wing bias, and we need it to still exist.
It doesn't excuse the privacy paywall though.
They’re still rife with TERFs, they sacked Carole Cadwalladr, and now they’re pivoting to AI, so I wouldn’t give them a penny.
Presses back button
Only the rich can afford privacy
There's no ads when you use uBlock Origin.
This pop-up finally caused me to learn how the element zapper feature works
There's a filter list for cookie popups.
No tracking cookies, either lol
Pretty sure this is illegal but I guess whatever fine they get is just the cost of business
Funnily enough, the UK has just had a report commissioned about it (and I'm focussing on the UK here since the Guardian is based there and OP alson said they were accessing the UK site). It notes that "In principle, data protection law does not prohibit business models that involve consent or pay." Direct pdf link: https://ico.org.uk/media/about-the-ico/impact-assessments/4032418/consent-or-pay-impact-assessment.pdf
Gotta love how the legal system here outright ignores the laws that they're ruling on, GDPR states that the accept and reject buttons need to be equally accessable.
tangential but I've given up on managing cookie preferences on most sites
I installed cookie autodelete and allow sites I care about, then let the rest get purged when I close their tab
it's probably not perfect -- they could still build a profile based on IP address, browser fingerprint, etc. -- but I figure it at least makes it harder for a lot of em
plus I'm not on Facebook or Google or the other big advertising platforms so that helps
Probably the most reasonable strategy tbh. And fencing. And using multiple browsers for different purposes.
