How to spot it
- The dialogue offers Later rather than No, so declining is never final.
- The same prompt appears after every update, every launch, or every third visit.
- There is no setting to stop it, only to postpone it.
- The decline shrinks over time while the accept stays the same size.
- It arrives at the moment you are trying to do something else, which is not a coincidence.
Why it works on you
Repetition costs the asker almost nothing and costs you a decision every time. You do not have to be persuaded, only tired: eventually you accept to make the prompt stop, and from the outside that is indistinguishable from consent. It also exploits context. A request refused calmly at a desk is refused less reliably when it interrupts something you were in the middle of.
What to do
- Look for the real off switch in settings before answering the prompt, not after the fifth one.
- Deny permissions at the operating system level, where the answer is remembered properly.
- Notice when you are accepting to end an interruption rather than because you want the thing. That is the moment the pattern is working.
- On a phone, turn notifications off per app rather than per prompt.
Where the law stands
Nagging is mostly outside the reach of specific rules, which is part of why it is everywhere. Where it is used to extract consent for data processing it runs into the GDPR requirement that consent be freely given, and consent obtained by wearing someone down is not. Article 25 of the EU Digital Services Act prohibits repeatedly asking a user to make a choice they have already made, which is the most direct statement of it in any regulation so far.
This is a description of published regulation, not legal advice, and rules in this area have changed more than once. The sources below are the primary ones.