People keep confusing the adserving/retargeting sector with the identity-sector (Google, Facebook). Identity (centralized) vs anonymous (or decentralized) is an important debate. But the adserving industry are not picking sides in that debate. they don't want your name, and they are not keeping any data any milisecond longer than required, because it's all low-margin: costs matter a lot.
People want all their content for free. People don't want annoying popups all the time. So when you look at some product, you get a cookie. That product-id and the cookie-id (that refers to your browser, not you) go into a typical cassandra or redis cluster for about 30 days. Then they are deleted.
End result: (1) your content is free (2) you are not drowning in ads (3) your privacy was not violated. Nobody in _this_ sector wants to store your personal stuff.
People should be concerned about what identity-providers (like Google or Facebook) do with your information. And people should be very wary of identity-providers where you are not the customer. But pure adserving companies, the ones targetted with this tool, were never messing with your privacy in the first place. All tools like this do, is put websites out of bussiness.
Can the intelligent people in HN please start getting more informed about the difference between these two sectors?
Retargeting-sector ==> Be anonymous, see few ads, get free content. Low-margin, technology-driven.
Identity-sector ==> Give all your info, see lots of ads, spam your friends. High-margin, social-life-extortion-driven.
And maybe, not freak out so much about 'retargeting'. Retargeting is fine: its why so much of the internet is free. It funds many YC companies (like Reddit). Just don't ever deal with identity providers who also sell ads. But that's about 10 scripts of the thousands that are blocked by this tool.