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Comment by jchw

1 month ago

As much as I hate cookie consent dialogs everywhere, the fact is that it is clearly working. Some companies are going as far as to force users to pay money in order to be able to opt out of data collection. If it wasn't so cumbersome to opt-out, I reckon the numbers for opt-out would be even higher. And if companies weren't so concerned about the small portion of users that opt-out, they wouldn't have invested in finding so many different dark patterns to make it hard.

It is definitely true that most users don't know what they're opting out of, they just understand that they have basically nothing to gain anyway, so why opt-in?

But actually, that's totally fine and working as intended. To be fair to the end user, Apple has done something extremely complicated here, and it's going to be extremely hard for anyone except for an expert to understand it. A privacy-conscious user could make the best call by just opting out of any of these features. An everyday user might simply choose to not opt-in because they don't really care about the feature in the first place: I suspect that's the real reason why many people opt-out in the first place, you don't need to understand privacy risks to know you don't give a shit about the feature anyway.