Folks talking about how easy it is to see and change these settings, remember that many of the patterns and practices being litigated go back years to when these settings were less clearly stated, if they were stated at all. The reason there is such transparency now is because of years of pressure from lawsuits, regulators, and reporting.
For me it's less about knowing how to turn them off and the constant worrying fear they'll be reset with the latest update, or some random feature that I actually need will get turned off along with it.
When considering bad faith actors, I tend to consider taking extreme: I worry that the toggles don't actually do anything at all. Or there's some other means of exfiltration in use that's not covered by the existing controls.
> the constant worrying fear they'll be reset with the latest update
Which happens a lot and is very annoying.
A fantastic example is how Twitter defaulted everyone's DMs to only allow them from people that pay for subscriptions. It is also buried. Settings > Privacy and Safety > Direct Messages. What a fucking crazy dark pattern. It's so bad I see recruiters routinely post "DM me" and they have their inbox closed.
Probably. Though they can also change their settings.
While I agree with you, at the same time I think we need to recognize that most people are very uncomfortable with switching platforms. There's a lot of opportunity costs to most people. People tend not to be long term thinkers and aren't considering the consequences of their actions. For example, look at how many people here on HN -- where tech literacy is high as well as capabilities -- complain about Google's domination of the internet yet at every turn are quick to go after Mozilla and Firefox. The main alternatives are still Chromium based browsers. Same is true about Apple's walled garden. The sad truth is that things won't change unless we can convince the __average__ person, not __a__ person. Hell, I can't even get the most paranoid big brother boomer to use Signal despite it being rather trivial. I just don't know anymore tbh.
Many people don't understand this in the same way that many people don't understand the tweaks you can make to your car engine.
Sometimes they make changes which undoes the settings and sometimes settings are per device. It is quite difficult to keep track of it all.
And sometimes turning off an ad feature cuts out a ton of non ad features. Example I can't turn off Google location tracking ad features without turning off googles ability to show me recent locations I drove to which I find quite helpful.
