I don't think it's much of a stretch to call it abuse.

Imagine this was a person-to-person thing. Person A wants person B to consent to something person B does not want to consent to. And let's not beat around the bush here: we're all thinking of something sexual right now. A repeatedly asks B, and no matter how many times B says no, A claims that B said "maybe later". B does not get to say "fuck off" unless B somehow quits A altogether.

Now that is messed up enough already, but what these forms do is give you no other option than answer "maybe later". That's a level above putting words in someone's mouth that I am sure would be considered a form of violation if someone in a position of power could do that to someone else.

And that very much applies here: I don't get to create the pop-ups in an app or on a website, so the app-makers are abusing a position of power here.

I had just thought of this exact analogy too. Another one that came to mind is a forced/coerced confession. Usually it's combined with something more extreme like sleep deprivation/psychological abuse but the way it often works is just asking someone over and over for hours whether they committed the crime / how they did it. Eventually people confess just to make it stop. I see this as the same thing on a smaller scale: eventually you just accept the terms/update/whatever to make the annoying notifications go away. But you were still coerced into that decision out of annoyance and frustration

> You know, if a country ran an election over and over until they got the "right" answer it would obvious that said country wasn't a democracy.

European Union has a tendency to do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_related_to_the_Eur...

No, it doesn't, and I'm getting kinda tired of the EU being depicted this way.

A treaty gets rejected, renegotiated, the public is informed of the changes, and then is voted on again. For example, per your own linked article:

> Denmark — The Danish Maastricht Treaty referendum, 1992, 2 June 1992, 50.7% against, turnout 83.1%

> Denmark — The Danish Maastricht Treaty referendum, 1993, 18 May 1993, 56.7% in favour, turnout 86.5%

> In Denmark, two referendums were held before the treaty of Maastricht passed. The first one rejected the treaty. After the defeat of the treaty in the first refererendum, Denmark negotiated and received four opt-outs from portions of the treaty: Economic and Monetary Union, Union Citizenship, Justice and Home Affairs, and Common Defence. The second referendum approved the treaty amended with the opt-outs.

That is how politics is supposed to work: debate and negotiate until a consensus is reached, and even then keep updating the rules as things change.

This is not a "vote until you answer what we want you to answer." Sure, there is an agenda by the diplomats to integrate Europe into one transnational union. But they're open about that, and the public does get to vote on big decisions through these referenda. The process through which all of this happens is a lot more democratic than, say, a big corporations pushing political parties to push a law through (and yes, that also happens in the EU, but that's a problem in political systems everywhere).