Is anyone else confused by thier cookie consent banner? The switches start out gray and become black when toggled. which position means consent? It feels intentionally misleading.

This is how you get statutory warning labels and nutrtion information labels on packages.

Because these folks always want to do the least legal thing allowed by law.

> The switches start out gray and become black when toggled.

Rant: That type of slider-switch is an inferior usurper of the classic tickbox, that rode in on a wave of touch-screen-ification. Oh, it can be done well, sometimes, but it's just far-too-easy to do it badly.

In this case (useless colors, no intrinsic text labels, etc.) I think the remaining rule/clue is "Move the dot-nub towards whatever you want." So moving right is indicating you like the "We track you" text, while moving left indicates some kind of disagreement.

_____________________

> It feels intentionally misleading.

The "Accept All" button is worse:

1. It abuses UI conventions of position and color that belong to a "Proceed with what is shown" button.

2. Likewise, the text-label is ambiguous: It could mean "Accept All [of the choices which I've made and can see]"... But instead it means "Reject whatever is on-screen, and replace all choices with 'accept' cookies."

3. When it does erase/reset all choices made, it does so in a secretive way by also submitting and vanishing the dialog. The user never has any opportunity to realize that the machine implicitly flipped all choices to the right-most position.

Any one of these might be an innocent mistake, but all three sins together are a dark-pattern.

Just block cookies, and it doesn't matter whether you consent or not.

Of course, paradoxically, these consent banners need to put a cookie to remember that you didn't consent to cookies, so you might need a plugin like uBlock to block the banner as well.