Has something in the law changed recently (and by "recently" I mean maybe 6 months to a year)? I was sure the cookie laws required there to be a "no" option that *didn't* require paying money to refuse cookies. Now I see high profile web sites like the Guardian giving the options "have your data harvested" or "pay for a subscription" (which, of course, won't opt you out of data harvesting because you'll have to be logged in and therefore be even more fully tracked than before). (Thank goodness Firefox's "reader view" bypasses the pop-up entirely.)
no, they're just assuming no one will sue them.
I also did sign up to guardian to try it out, because yeah fair enough reporters need to eat; and they repeatedly log you out on every article load, so its useless. Cancelled and gave up on them after that.