One good side effect of the GDPR pop-up is that I can now use it as a proxy measurement for ownership shadiness and information usefulness. If the pop-up makes

One good side effect of the GDPR pop-up is that I can now use it as a proxy measurement for ownership shadiness and information usefulness. If the pop-up makes it reasonably easy to opt out and start reading, it's usually a good indication that a) nobody feels the need to hide anything weird they do with my data and b) that the information is useful enough that whatever engagement is generated organically is enough to serve the overall business goals (including e.g. tracking dissemination goals), so nobody needs to get creative with aftermarket use of tracking data. If it doesn't, then it's a good sign that tracking data isn't quite being used in a way that the owners want to be made public, and/or that much of the information on the website is probably junk, so business goals are met by means other than providing accurate, useful information to interested customers. Sure, there are websites that don't fall in either of those nasty categories, they just have bad UIs. What can I say, management incompetence can have tough consequences.