Around 90% of users will never change a default setting unless it's directly interfering what they're trying to do.
I'm not sure why. Either maybe they don't know that there's a way to change settings, or maybe they're too afraid they'll break something, I don't know.
I try to show people where settings are in different apps and opperating systems and encourage them to explore the options, but it seems like they never do.
I think most people are just conditioned to live with the way things are. Some people will try to search for a solution online, but that's an extreme minority in my opinion. It seems like most people will suffer silently, and some others might complain, but they still won't do anything to fix it - just complain.
1. It might not be obvious that changing a setting could improve things. You need to have a solid mental model of how the specific tech works and how the setting could influence things. Casual users don't really have a model. Well, everyone has one, but for casual users it's more like a half-drawn sketch.
1. Changing a setting might break something - sometimes for good. Worse, it could break something unrelated (at least unrelated for the casual observer). Worst case scenario, it breaks something in a subtle way, that you only notice after a long time.
2. Changing a setting might break something that you can't fix on your own. Which takes us to a crucial social aspect: nobody like to feel dumb. Asking for help in many cultures and for many individuals makes them feel dumb.
Got a new laptop, it has a "high performance" nvidia GPU as well as the integrated AMD one. I was getting notifications that regular apps were using the wrong GPU and wasting battery, and I should use an option from the manufacturer to disable it. Once I eventually figured out that you needed to kill all such apps before enabling it does anything, everything seems fine, until weeks later I realise sleep isn't working.
Took a detour investigating "modern standby", which is Microsoft's new sleep mode that doesn't turn off the CPU and so was suspicious. But after messing around trying to force classic S3 sleep, messing with the powercfg command (which reported sleep as normal, wake on keypress, no wake timers, etc.), and testing with all apps closed, no change.
On the verge of giving up and assuming this was just the nature of modern standby, I booted a Ubuntu live USB, hit sleep, and saw all the usual pulsing LEDs. That reminded me of seeing the same thing when I used the laptop for the very first time, so I had enough confidence to "refresh Windows" (a reinstall that keeps files).
After doing so, I hit sleep, it worked fine, then had to gradually reconfigure the laptop, hitting sleep every time until it broke, which of course was just after I started feeling brave enough to make multiple changes every time. Narrowed it down to the GPU setting and all working fine after changing it back, but I'm going to be very selective about what I change and install for a while now.
I think most people who enabled the setting (as prompted!) would just be living with the battery drain though.
There’s probably some ptsd from seeing a geek squad van pulling up out front for a lot of households.
That's where the trouble will come. I can see trend emerge where essential functionality could be blocked on account of tracking being disabled. I have some faith policies and people will work against this but i've seen so many dark patterns in freemium that I think this sort of dishonesty could just work.
Tracked ads have more value because it's more likely that you'll buy something targeted at you. So you need to show less ads compared to untracked ads to extract the same value.
I think that this kind of differentiation is allowed by Apple and probably will be implemented in some apps.