Somewhere on a site or an app, you were shown a box. Most likely you tapped Accept and moved on — the whole point of the design is that you would. What you agreed to, in that quarter-second, was to be shared with ninety-nine separate companies, each with its own privacy policy, each recorded against your session as “No Choice Set.” This is who they are, who owns them, and what many of them do that has nothing to do with any service you ever asked for.
The list of 99 lives one layer down, behind a link most people never touch. Researchers who watch how consent banners are actually used keep landing on the same uncomfortable number.
Put those together and the phrase “No Choice Set” becomes almost literal. Consent was recorded, but a choice — an informed, deliberate one — was never really made. That is not an accident of the design. It is the design. And it is why the ads seem to know you: you were introduced to all 99 of these companies at once, and you were built to keep walking.
Filter by role, or by the parts that should give you pause. Tap any name to see who owns it and what it does besides collecting you. The counter keeps score of how many you actually review — quietly proving how easy the “open it” part really was.
Most names on the list are, at least, ad companies — you can trace a logic, however invasive. These are different. Their core business is not showing you a banner. It is your television, your medicine cabinet, your mailbox, your credit file, your movements, or your workplace — repackaged as an advertising signal. There is no service here you signed up for.
Ninety-nine names suggests a crowded, competitive field. But pull the thread and many of them run back to the same handful of parents — several of which are companies you'd never file under “advertising” in the first place.
A browser setting (built into Firefox, Brave, and DuckDuckGo; available as an extension elsewhere) that broadcasts an automatic “do not sell/share” signal to every site. In several U.S. states it carries the force of law.
When a banner appears, spend the extra click. Studies find a real “Reject all” option removes 40–70% of the tracking data points a site would otherwise collect on you.
On your smart TV, look for “ACR,” “Viewing Information Services,” or “Live Plus,” and switch it off. That's the setting that lets names like Alphonso, Samba and Nexxen read your screen.
The tools at optout.aboutads.info and youradchoices.com, and Experian's own marketing opt-out, won't stop collection entirely — but they narrow it, and they're the levers these companies are legally pointed toward.