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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

At this point, publishers should probably just accept that any tracking is unacceptable, so if they want people to pay (and therefore login), then they need to stop funneling data to ad networks and other PII aggregators.

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Who says it’s unacceptable? The incredibly tiny minority of readers coming from HN?

I used to think this was a tiny minority, too. But a key takeway from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n... was this statistic: "26% of Internet users are now blocking ads." Its a minority, but its not tiny.

Very, very probably only to declutter their screen. Does the survey collect intent about why they install it?

I doubt anywhere near 26% block ads because of tracking. I doubt even 1% if users even understand what tracking means.

Many of them probably also didn't set the ad blocker up themselves - they have tech-savvy relatives handle their computer stuff, and those tech-savvy relatives have realized that fewer ads means fewer malicious social engineering ads means less malware to remove during the next visit.

I doubt that even 1% of internet users understand the extent of the PII that is collected. I would guess if the general public understood how all this worked, there would be many more people who objected to the practice.

It's only my personal opinion, but I don't care at all about tracking. They can track me all they like. I block ads because they make my browsing slow, cause my CPU to turbo boost, interrupt my browsing, clutter the web pages excessively. I suspect a huge majority of that 26% is similar to me in this.

Where do you get the impression that it's a minority?

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/most-americans...

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