This is the flimsy excuse made not to respect the Do Not Track header. By making it so that it's a tool for expressing the user's opinion, be it negative or positive, it becomes harder to spin it as being a tool that does not actually embody the user's view.
A user giving consent to <site|app...> A does not translate into consent for <site|app...>.
And yes, the default for such consent questions must be "no"
There is one and only one legal default under the GDPR: Do not track.
This is immediately followed by every head of marketing (at least for US-based companies) asking "Okay, so how do we track those people?"
I'm not saying this is right. But it is reality. We normalized for two decades marketing leadership having the expectation that they can track every interaction, and prying that data away has been painful, especially for folks who really want to do the right thing but are told otherwise by their managers.
Not exactly. The issue was that a specific version of IE enabled that header without giving the user a choice. If a user explicitly chooses to toggle the header, or install an add-on, then that argument would not hold up.