This Site Asks For Consent To Use Your Data

So for the past week I’ve been getting this undismissable pop-up window when I visit the site (I don’t stay logged in, obv.) There are multiple options for customising the data collected and used by the site and its partners. My favorite part:

What if don’t consent?

Your personal data won’t be used for the above, unless we and our vendors determine that we have a legitimate interest to do so.

Alrighty then. I’m aware my adblocker will simply block this pop-up but I’d rather keep the SDMB in the ‘trusted sites’ list.

So what gives? Why is the happening now?

They want to profile you and harvest your data for, let’s say, not your personal benefit. However, not asking for your consent is highly illegal in jurisdictions like Europe and the U.K., so they have to do so. The annoying/misleading pop-ups they hope impatient people will click through without reading.

Just install uBlock origin and forget about it…

As I wrote, I use an ad blocker (uBlock as it happens) and was purposefully whitelisting this site, but that’s not what my question is about. I wanted to know why this was recently implemented…the result of new legislation? A decision by the owners of the site? etc. etc…

I’ve never seen this. Still am not.

I use uBlock Origin but even turning it off, I’m not getting any kind of data consent popup.

But I’m in the good ol’ US of A, where consent to many things is generally assumed.

Thanks for checking. I should have mentioned that I’m in the UK. Maybe it’s just the SDMB being several years late on the GDPR.

The are still a lot of US sites that haven’t complied and are blocked in Europe. The Chicago Tribune, for example.

As of about a year ago, Discourse didn’t have a unified answer to GDPR (including the UK-GDPR variant)*. It’s possible that they just came up with something, or TPTB here found something to give the board the opportunity to be GDPR compliant rather than blocking UK and EU visitors.

*based on my reading of this Discourse Meta thread: