Comment by AnthonyMouse

Using percentages is illegitimate. It's frog boiling.

Governments lean on large providers like Microsoft to not implement strong technological privacy protections because they want to invade everyone's privacy, and those companies go along because they want to get government contracts or curry favor with government regulators, or because they want to invade your privacy themselves.

Then anyone privacy-conscious abandons them before any abuses are revealed because they've seen this movie before and know what's coming next. But that includes criminal organizations, so now for a transient period of time the competing services that still protect privacy have a disproportionate number of criminals. This is then used as an excuse to shut them down or force them to stop protecting anyone's privacy.

That's when the real abuses start, because the privacy-protecting services have been suppressed as "only used by criminals" and once the general public has lost the ability to switch, there is no longer competitive pressure on the incumbents to not betray their now-captive user base.

You can try to prevent this by getting people to switch to the privacy-protecting services ahead of time, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable to accept the consent-manufacturing tactic as legitimate either.