Is it GDPR compliant to hide a competition entry behind a requirement to sign up to a newsletter
<p>I'm looking to run a giveaway competition on my website. The main aim of the competition is to get signups to our email newsletter. I'm therefore proposing that 1. a user signs up to my newsletter (with the usual caveats, opt-ins etc), then 2. once they are signed up they will be shown a separate, standalone option to enter the competition.</p>
<p>This would allow people already signed up to still access the competition entry as our system would know their email address is signed up with us.</p>
<p>I think I'm safe in that competition entry is not bundled with the newsletter signup, they are separate actions, but the competition is only open to those that are signed up to the newsletter. Is that GDPR compliant?</p>

<p>As so often here, my advice is &quot;get a specialist lawyer in your jurisdiction.&quot; That being said, GDPR requires free and informed consent to data handling. The concept you should be looking at is informally called coupling, formally defined in <a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679#d1e2001-1-1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Article 7(4)</a>, and it is broadly speaking forbidden -- you may not make features conditional on consent if the consent is not required for the feature.</p>

gdpr