Maybe the principal investigator Jonathan Mayer [1] should have read his own paper [2] about dark patterns. From the abstract "There is a rapidly growing literature on dark patterns [...] that researchers deem problematic" [2].

This research looks like a dark pattern to me.

[1] https://privacystudy.cs.princeton.edu/ [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3411764.3445610