> One could argue that's a good thing.
Then you should make that argument. If you think it's a good thing, put in the effort of saying why. Don't force me to imagine why it might be so.
> That's not a claim, that's a fact.
Sure. But asking for explicit consent for the innocuous thing: logging a bit and nothing else, doesn't change the fact that the company could be lying. Nothing is gained. If they're lying about logging the bit, they might be lying if you opt out. Obviously it's far easier to figure out what is being sent than what is being being logged serverside, but you'd still need to verify that independently. If you don't trust the group providing the service, unless its verifiably trustless (not communicating at all or client-side encrypted with minimal side channels), you shouldn't use the service. Otherwise, you're still trusting the service provider.
> The horror!
Yes. Making people expend mental energy on otherwise unimportant/irrelevant decisions is anti-user.
> Good, people shouldn't blindly sign up to services they don't understand just because it's a new shiny thing.
My point is a lot of people do understand and just don't give a shit. Getting in the way of those people is anti-user.
> Music to my ears.
Again, anti-user.
> I care about the people whose data will inevitably be leaked
I'm talking about innocuous things. Things where being leaked isn't a problem: truly anonymous or aggregated data that can't be used to identify or tied back to an individual user or group. You're saying users should still need to opt in to those kinds of tracking. That's anti-user. It obfuscates actually harmful tracking.
To phrase it another way, there's PII and not-PII. Are you suggesting that tracking of non-PII need explicit user consent? Even if revealing non-PII, by definition, can't be tied to an individual user?
>by said business in a future breach.
Recently, we've seen leaks of PII from CapitolOne and Equifax. Click boxes on websites don't help when the data being leaked is banking information that (for capone) has to be stored tied to an identity and can only be opted out of by not using the products in question (credit cards, banks), or isn't gotten from the user at all (equifax).
How does clicky-consent boxes on their websites help with that?