He's been shitting on his employer pretty much since the beginning. It just seems like he went for the fuck around and find out method and I am willing to bet that him and his staff are quite surprised he hasn't found out after all these years.

That latter message is exactly what I got on Chrome on my work computer. It said something akin to "Ad privacy is turned on. Go here to edit the settings!" and then you go look and they're all set to be enabled. I had to turn them all off.

I got the pop-up on desktop chrome yesterday and I had to intentionally go to the settings and turn them off.

Maybe it's different on mobile chrome? I don't know but it was absolutely opt-out on desktop.

I use Firefox as my main browser but work requires I use chrome for some stupid bullshit. Otherwise I wouldn't touch the browser at all.

It's not opt-in. These settings are automatically set to be turned on unless you intentionally turn them off. So they're opt-out by definition.