"It’s increasingly hard to “opt out” of online tracking. “Unless you want to go live in a cave away from society,” Nissenbaum notes, you need to be online—often for work or to access government services. Online services claim they’re voluntary, but the cost of being a refusenik grows every day."

Since most advertising and tracking currently happens by loading third-party Javascript, it's trivial for clients to detect and block. If advertiser-hostile clients proliferate, the industry will shift towards techniques that are more difficult to block.

Proxy ads through software on the actual webserver; make them part of the markup like any other page element. Ingest the Apache access logs. Use website-level cookies and relay them to the ad network on the server side. Etc.

Because there are 14 trackers on wired.com. Because:

>One, AdNauseam, clicks every ad on every page I visit

Wired would like you do install addons that click on every ad on wired.com.

Blocking breaks webpages sometimes.

Part time blocking can create even more focused profiles Poisoning the well is better if you aren't willing to or can't commit to 100% blocking.

Obfuscating snoopers' profiles is more satisfying.

Why not do both?

Spending over $100,000 per month on advertising online, we do analyze traffic under the microscope. Blocking ads only means Publisher has to display more of it to even out the good traffic.

Continuesly bringing people that are totally off te chart in re to our vertical (due to someone fooling system of their true interests) would bring down ROI to near-zero and have us stop using said Publisher althogether.

Genius move!