[stemuk]

When it comes to the greater public, default settings might as well be the only available setting. Apart from a few 'techies' most people will never even touch the default settings out of the naive belief that "the default setting is what's best for me".

As an alternative approach I would suggest empty settings to begin with, forcing the user to think about their preferences on first use.

[selebrazin]

That would only work if every browser implemented it but for the average user, choosing between a blank-slate approach where they have to parse through terminology they don't understand, and an alternative offering "sensible" defaults, I suspect most users would just pick the easier latter option.

[mikro2nd]

Perhaps there's a middle ground. Give users a range of options (say 3 to 5) that aggregate the settings, ranging from "I don't really care about privacy" to "I wear a tinfoil hat to bed", along with pointers to where and how they might wish to delve deeper into more detailed settings. It can't be that hard...?

[slavik81]

If you put a big scary decision as the first thing users see, many will just close the browser because they don't know what they should pick. When they open a different browser that doesn't present them with that choice, they may conclude that it's not a problem on that other browser.