What's crazy is how openly anti-individual Google is.

They explicitly and aggressively facilitate practices that virtually every single person is against.

... in the tech-commentary echo chamber, perhaps.

The outside world is more apathetic than hostile to it.

It shouldn’t be on the todo list of the average user to be knowledgeable on this subject, just like the average consumer should not have to be an expert in airbags to expect the ones installed in their car to work.

I think there's a huge assumption implied in an analogy between airbags and user tracking. Airbags save lives. Anti-tracking guards against some hand-wavey philosophical concerns regarding privacy (in an inconsistent fashion, even... It's hard for me to buy that we need to make user-behavior tracking for ad targeting illegal in a world where user-purchase tracking for credit reporting is legal).

My point is that an average consumer does not and should not need to understand some complex embedded technology in the products they buy and use, and that their lack of interest and understanding of such technologies can’t be used to infer their intent on a broader subject (privacy,safety,health, etc)

Absolutely. People don't care about this stuff and honestly, I'm not expecting them to, because I don't care about much of the world either. But I do care about this issue and so, I'd like better regulation so that the individuals' privacy is better protected, with the same level of them not caring.

The motto of some people on this website when it comes to unethical behavior in tech seems to “Well, most people didn’t actively try to stop us…”

Previously GA and GTM would share private data with Google but we could at least see requests going out to google, so if you had rejected data being shared with 3rd parties or hadn't been asked at all (think GDPR) you could see that the website was breaking the law. This clever solution from Google hides it from us, consumers, so that we will just have to trust that if a website doesn't ask if it may share our details with Google, or when we tell them not to share data with Google, they actually won't do that.

Just to enphasise: for GDPR it really doesn't matter where your data is shared with a third party, from the browser or server. It's your data so they have to ask your permission to share it and otherwise they can't.

No we couldn't see the requests, and that's because we couldn't see what the backend does, which was always the case since the inception of remote procedure calls.

To illustrate my point, here's a Stackoverflow question from nearly 10 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11795477/using-google-an...

Whatever trust was ever there, it was false.