That is a very good question/suggestion. It is a good idea to make the option easier to find. I definitely think it is important to educate more people about the issue.

There may some validity to the idea that "the journey is part of the gift"--that is, the harder the option is to find, the stronger the signal of user intent. But, I don't think the current balance in Firefox is correct. I'm not sure that a checkbox at startup is the right answer either. if you ask on Mozilla's dev-privacy mailing list [1], you might get a response from some somebody that has thought about it more than me. Then I'll get to learn about it too.

[1] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-privacy

the user don't care at that time - they probably have something more urgent to look at the first time they run their browser, and if you bombard them with questions, it gets annoying.

I agree with the default being ON (that is, DNT is turned on). The analogy with the doughnuts and pre-printed message isn't quite accurate in this case, because it is _clearly_ a better choice to not have tracking done on the user, whilst with a box of donuts, its not always clear cut whether sharing it or not is the right thing to do.

Every OS comes with a browser other than firefox by default (except certain flavours of Linux, but they could make the choice part of the install process). If the user needs to look at something on the internet right now, they won't go searching for firefox, downloading and installing it. Having one simple checkbox that takes half a minute to decide on won't make installs take all that longer. Or just display a configuration page the first time the browser starts up with a "you can set all these later too from <here>, btw" message.