The public cares about privacy, yes. But only as long as its presence doesn‘t inconvenience them in any way.

People hate the GDPR pop ups. Most are badly designed (probably on purpose) and make it easy to accept all and difficult to customize/reject all. Most people are just going to click accept because it makes the box disappear faster.

Let‘s say we have the new Apple opt-in rules for Facebook. There‘s a pop-up some day asking users: „do you want facebook to be able to track you?“ many people will say no. But only because it‘s really easy/frictionless and the app presumably functions as normal.

So primarily users want to do want users want to do. They don‘t care about tracking/ads as long as avoiding them isn‘t completely simple.