Almost nobody changes a setting. The figure varies by product and by study, but the shape is consistent: somewhere between three and eight per cent of users will ever open a preferences panel, and a smaller fraction still will alter anything they find there. Whatever the software does when it arrives is what it will do forever, for nearly everyone. Designers have known this for thirty years. The knowledge has consequences that the profession discusses less openly than it might. The benign reading is that defaults are a service. Most people have no informed preference about cookie duration or telemetry granularity, and forcing a decision on them is not respect but abdication. A well chosen default is a form of expertise offered at no cost to the recipient. The less comfortable reading is that a default is the most powerful instrument of control in the entire discipline, precisely because it does not feel like one. Nothing is forbidden. Everything remains adjustable. The user retains, at every moment, complete formal freedom, and exercises it at a rate of five per cent. Organ donation is the case everyone cites. Countries with presumed consent report participation above ninety per cent; countries requiring active enrolment report figures in the teens. The populations are not morally different. The form is different. What makes this genuinely difficult, rather than merely scandalous, is that no neutral position is available. A designer who refuses to nudge must still ship something, and whatever ships becomes the default. Declining to choose is itself a choice, made worse by being unexamined. There is no interface with no starting state. The honest response is not to pretend to neutrality but to accept authorship. If the default is going to govern behaviour, then the person setting it is exercising authority and should be expected to justify it in those terms, rather than in the language of user empowerment that tends to accompany these decisions. That expectation is not currently enforced anywhere in the industry, and it is not obvious what would enforce it. Regulation arrives late and addresses the previous generation of the problem. Professional norms exist but are unevenly held. Meanwhile the panel remains open, technically, to everyone. The setting can be changed at any time by anybody who cares to look for it. Five per cent will.