>users have gotten so used to clicking through content screens they don’t pay attention anymore because a lot of it is meaningless

I suspect the goal is to manufacture consent through inundation of fraudulent and coercive consent agreements.

Actually many are required.

I had a funny situation in person recently. This place had consent forms - lady checking folks in would offer to sign on your behalf. A few folks asked what it was - a consent form - oh sure, please sign for me.

In gsuite I guess there are some settings that can impact things like location - people want recent locations to pop up etc I learned. So anytime you make 95 percent of users click through stuff they don’t care about - you start losing the battle here

Consent forms force people into legally binding agreements, with massive power disparity, under duress.

The consumer bears all the risk and the provider absolves themselves of any - unless one afford a lengthy court battle or join a class action. I suppose even more rarely a consumer can get, often fractional, relief through a government or consumer rights agency.

EULAs, consent forms, and similar are a wholesale miscarriage of justice that causes incalculable irreparable harm to a staggering number of people every day. Think about it this way, a liability waiver at a doctors office is not dissimilar, in terms of bargaining ability, to an entry level employee's boss demanding sexual favors to keep their job. I have a broken arm, fix it, if the doctor screws up pay for all resulting costs forever.

Justice, equality, and equity should never be limited to those with the most means.

One last point to hopefully drive my point out of the park. Say I don't want to consent to gmails EULA, so I go and look into hosting my own webserver. Bad news, windows has a eula, okay I'll learn how to use Linux and FOSS software. But wait to need to connect my pc to the internet. I can't escape an internet providers take it or leave it eula. But I need email, I will get fired (lose everything in life) without it. So in effect I am forced, under duress, to 'consent' to a non-negotiable agreement that I reject with every fiber of my being so that I do not lose my home, family, and everything else.

Which is why these govt type of interventions, which are all centered around getting more and more permissions from users are annoying. We will get more click through screens that 99.99% of users will say yes to. Seriously, how many users read the google ToS clickthroughs and make a decision based on that to not sign up with a google account?

I turned this stuff off at policy level, and instead of praising me, users were pissed at me. They wanted google to track them. Most didn't understand why stuff didn't work (things like saving locations in maps break at least in past, and most use gmaps for work / home commute checks). Seriously - if you run a larger gsuite deploy, put all the privacy features on and watch how folks start trying to work around / do the shadow IT thing.

And the answer is increasingly to silence the question itself with ad blockers.

the cookie debacle really illustrated how toothless and futile current regulatory attemps are, the industry simply side-stepped the intent of the legislation and that was the end of it. It seems the cookie notices are annoying by design to guide public opinion against future regulatory attempts. "See what they made us do? Don't regulations stink?!"

>It seems the cookie notices are annoying by design to guide public opinion against future regulatory attempts. "See what they made us do? Don't regulations stink?!"

I get that impression also, and doubly so for the FUD-packed GDPR messages. "Oh sorry, we can't legally serve this webpage to you, EU resident, because of the atrocious GDPR! (because it's full of spyware which the GDPR forbids but we won't say that part out loud)"

For what it's worth, I do think the GDPR messages are raising awareness in a way the cookie warnings were not, in part because some websites use dark patterns to get you to "agree" and others do not, and people are starting to smell the bullshit. If nothing else, the laundry list of trackers the websites are required to tell you about is a real eye-opener to the layperson who doesn't run uMatrix.

If think the regulation wasn't a point of this work, but the main reason this was worked on in my opinion, was to fleece the tax payer. Imagine how many dinners, conferences, experts, lawyers, contractors, researchers had to be paid over the years. They eventually had to come up with something and that's the half bottomed result. If it doesn't work? Well, everyone already got paid and probably now work on something completely different. If there is too much noise about this, they'll have a reason to fleece the tax payer again and go through years of "fixing" the legislation. This is when you have unaccountable organisation (EC) without any bodies that would and could investigate corruptions and scams like these.

That and an attempt by companies to continue a business model that is expressly illegal under the GDPR. If a company relies on user-tracking with assumed consent, being required to get affirmative and freely given consent tanks their income. And that's perfectly okay and reasonable for laws to do. Business models are not a right.

But, those companies then have a choice. Option A: Accept that their business model relied on widespread stalking of their users which was never acceptable and is now illegal, and significantly change the business. Option B: Pretend they didn't notice, throw up a pop-up ignore the "freely given" requirement for consent, and hope nobody calls them out on it.

Option B is a lot easier for scummy companies to do, and the prevalence of opt-out banners with assumed consent and dark patterns shows how many companies went that route.