The dark pattern is claiming that something that shares your information is a privacy feature in order to trick people into turning it on. An actual privacy sandbox (like uBlock origin) just blocks things like malware scripts and tracking pixels with no concession to the people who are trying to track you. An actual privacy sandbox does not have features for publishers, SSPs, or DSPs. It--as part of the user's agent--has features for the user.

Users can opt out of the Privacy Sandbox features if they know they are there and they understand the options, IMV the settings for this are unclear at best almost to the point of being misleading.

We all know the power of defaults which is why users have to opt-out of participating in Topics rather than opting in.

The browser is supposed to be the users agent but for most people the Topics API isn’t acting in their interests. I suspect if you asked people whether they we happy for any site that asked to know the sorts of things they browsed the web for they’d say no.

As for 3rd-party cookies they should have been killed off long ago, the reason the death is delayed is because Google is primary an AdTech company and other adtech companies persuaded the UK competition authorities that Chrome killing them off without a suitable replacement would be anti-competitive hence misnamed ‘Privacy Sandbox APIs’

Apple has its own set of issues e.g. why can’t content blockers block in app ads but Apple’s issues are a separate conversation

Every company maintains data about your use on their platform. That’s expected. I don’t expect to go to Sears and shop for a refrigerator and see Sears ads on other pages advertising products I looked at specifically