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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with mental gymnastics. Consent isn't a meaningful concept when it comes to each individual setting of a piece of software. You'd have to make 500 decisions every minute if you had to actively consent to everything your software does.

In fact cookie banners show this. People hate them because they force meaningless choices on them. If you make a website with tracking as an opt-out option, almost everyone clicks "accept all". If you make a website with tracking as opt-in, almost every one clicks accept all. That shows that opt-in/out or consent does literally nothing ot reflect people's preferences, the act of making a choice completely dominates the actual decision.

That means that if you want to respect user preferences you don't actually get around making default choices for them, and it's why consent is pretty much meaningless.

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> In fact cookie banners show this. People hate them because they force meaningless choices on them. If you make a website with tracking as an opt-out option, almost everyone clicks "accept all". If you make a website with tracking as opt-in, almost every one clicks accept all. That shows that opt-in/out or consent does literally nothing ot reflect people's preferences, the act of making a choice completely dominates the actual decision.

I disagree with this interpretation - the banners force themselves in front of the user before accessing the content. And then the choice is almost always "Accept all" and "complete a checklist mini-game of things you don't want cookies for". It's not a shock that people when confronted with this will click the easy button, and that doesn't mean it reflects their actual interests. It's just fatigue. If the "accept our cookies" button was off to the side of the page, and defaulted to "none" unless the user did something otherwise, I wonder what the "accept all" numbers would look like then. Actually, I don't.

> It's not a shock that people when confronted with this will click the easy button, and that doesn't mean it reflects their actual interests.

Yes, but that was my actual point. If one simple UI design trick is enough to completely flip the choices of users, then consent forms aren't a robust way to collect preferences at all. In fact if you wanted to genuinely and in good faith provide access to granular preferences, giving a more complicated set of choices would be the only way to go about it, and that fatigue is still real even if the design has a legitimate purpose.

What you're saying is true, the only way for the choice to be representative would be to have like a binary yes/no choice because that's simple, but that's not even necessarily what the user wants either. You're going to get a significantly more accurate view of people's real preferences by collecting data, like what Firefox is doing here, and then setting defaults accordingly.

That does not justify collecting such data without their explicit consent.

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