> That doesn't prevent dark UI patterns to highlight "Accept" and hide "Reject" as much as possible

I giggle every time I find this dark pattern thinking it is the modern equivalent of the ballots for the Austrian Merging referendum of 1938 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Austrian_Anschluss_refere...

To be fair the web of the early 2000s was full of ads too. I remember a time when people still used Yahoo as their homepage which was basically just a giant ad delivery platform with even more invasive ads than we have today. That's not to say that today is much better. It seems like most sites today try to walk the line between ad revenue and user retention.

The new dark pattern is to default everything off, but then have a separate switch labelled "legitimate reasons", which are all turned on for default.

For example https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (right wing UK newspaper). In the pop-up it says "You can also review where our partners claim a legitimate interest to use your data and, should you wish, object to them doing so.".

If you click manage it opens with "user consent" selected, where everything is turned off. Click save means they're not going to start tracking you, right?

Wrong, if you switch to "legitimate purpose", you'll see that everything is turned on. All those ad companies claim they have a legitimate purpose to be tracking you, even though you have zero business relationship with them.

Unless the ICO hands out some very heavy fines to those companies, the whole thing's become a farce, just like the cookie law was.

These dark patterns are very widespread, and are even seen on generally reputable websites like TomsHardware, but are they actually GDPR compliant?

GDPR enforcement is approximately zero, to my knowledge, so I don't know if there's even really an answer to the question.

For what it's worth, Wikipedia gives the impression no-one really knows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...