Most deep tracking done these days are not by means of ads being served, as the advertisers themselves lack the means of doing any meaningful analysis and don't have the reach, but rather tracking is done much more efficiently by very common utilities, like by Google Analytics, or the Facebook Like, Twitter's Tweet, or Google's +1 buttons. Heck, any third-party service can be a very good tracker. Are you also blocking Gravatar and Disqus? Because you should.
And nowadays you've got an "advertising ID" being exposed by the operating systems themselves, an ID that all apps can use to track your behavior across the net. I know of at least Windows 10, iOS and Android that do this. And this is actually a step up, as before the "advertising ID" apps were using much more persistent forms of identification.
And I'm all for being privacy conscious, personally I'm downright paranoid. But lets be honest, ad-blocking isn't about being privacy conscious.
There are two kinds of readers in this world: those who can read with a bunch of gyrating monkeys, dancing squirrels or flashing crap in the sidebar, and those who can't. I'm one who can't. If the ads behaved themselves better, I might be able to tolerate them. As it is, I block all of them. It's quite jarring to use the web on a browser which doesn't block ads - I find it unusable, for page load-speed and composition reasons (ads constantly muscling in on the body text as they get dragged in).
OK, I wrote that comment and I'm not a Ghostery user, so I don't know what it does by default. I'm not a Ghostery user because I do not trust it. Don't know the latest state of affairs, but the company developing Ghostery seemed fishy. I can trust either projects developed by non-profits committed to my interests, such as EFF or Mozilla, or projects developed by enthusiasts on GitHub.
Depending on the device, I am using Privacy Badger from EFF, Mozilla's Focus for iOS, or uBlock with the EasyPrivacy list. Was using AdBlock Plus in Firefox for Android, but it lacks the option to subscribe to third-party filter lists, an almost 2 year old ticket that still hasn't been fixed.
> But lets be honest, ad-blocking isn't about being privacy conscious.
Let's be honest, advertising is what pays for the whole menagerie of creepy snoops, therefore ad-blocking hurts even those creeps who track without ads of their own.
> tracking is done much more efficiently by very common utilities, like by Google Analytics, or the Facebook Like, Twitter's Tweet, or Google's +1 buttons
But adds are reason for the spying. There is no reason to collect all the data if they cannot monetize them. Currently there is no other way than adds.
And nowadays you've got an "advertising ID" being exposed by the operating systems themselves, an ID that all apps can use to track your behavior across the net. I know of at least Windows 10, iOS and Android that do this. And this is actually a step up, as before the "advertising ID" apps were using much more persistent forms of identification.
And I'm all for being privacy conscious, personally I'm downright paranoid. But lets be honest, ad-blocking isn't about being privacy conscious.