“We care about your privacy.” is also a real joker. Those boxes often provide no “opt-out all” button and force you to “object” to “legitimate interests” one-by-one even if you do “opt-out”.
Because lying works, propaganda works. You won't ever be able to convince everyone but you can confuse enough people that there isn't a united front that demands change. Especially those who want to believe because they're comfortable and thus reluctant to challenge the status quo. Also people who aren't intelligent enough to understand what's going on.
When people say “we care about global warming”, it doesn’t mean they want global warming to occur. Same with companies, they don’t want your privacy to continue either.
It used to be the most common lie was "I have read the EULA".
Nowadays the most common lie is "we care about your privacy" or possibly "we get it, you hate ads".
I wonder why, when I click to choose which measures I opt in/out, by default everything is just disabled and I just press confirm. Is it just me? Anyway, always saves me some effort.
Well, to properly comply you should assume no consent by default. However, most of the dialogs these days assume opt out for the main bit but there is a separate section for Legitimate Interest and you have to manually opt out of those. Is it possible you are just not noticing the separate legitimate interest section?
I used to see only that, but lately I've been seeing cases where once you choose the "manage cookies" option, all the nonessential cookies are opted out by default.
I can't trust that, a lot of websites do that but also keep all of the "Legitimate Interest" boxes ticked by default, I need to check every single pop-up to see if that's the case or not.
I hate these dark patterns and in spite I do lose my time to uncheck everything I can, if I can't untick everything in less than 20 seconds I simply close the website, no matter what.
You could also enable the annoyances filter lists if you're using ublock origin.
They remove the prompt altogether, but you've not given permission to anything.
I've seen that too, but a dark pattern here is pretending this is the whole truth and then hide a few hundred under a less visible "legitimate interest" tab.
Personally I use the Lockdown app which seems to block a lot, but suggestions about better alternatives are welcome.
That's how it's been handled for nearly 100% of the sites I went to for the last two years (that actually do contain ads, or use tracking for pointless internal analytics, that is). Or a variation thereof similarly letting you switch off most tracking using no more than two clicks.
