Sure, there's some technical steps that can be taken but there's also a social or cultural dimension to what behavior is popularly accepted fro companies.
This is what a browser with (or more appropriately, on) DNT is doing. Long way from camouflage.
And offline, we should also employ techniques like randomizing MAC addresses in mobile devices. Just like you lock your car even though it's illegal to jack it.
Don't worry, there's a startup that's "fixing" that[0].
Nomi uses the MAC address of your phone to identify the brick-and-mortar venues you visit. It's opt-out for consumers, and the only way to opt-out is to register your MAC address with them[1].
The browser shows where you are coming from, similar to you walking from one store that sent you to a second store. The browser's identifying marks are more like the color and type of your vehicle. The ID around your neck? That really is more like a company that would use facial recognition, or tagging your phone and tracking that.
What websites do is exactly what the parent described, like to a T. Often stores track you inside the premises though for marketing and display purpsoes, or so I've been told.
Yeah; it's called my face.
If the shopkeeper kept a logbook that recorded all of that, and then he published said logbook to other companies, you might feel that this was going a bit further than the social contract between you and the shopkeeper allows.
Though not a perfect analogy, the shopkeeper and you having small talk -- without anyone writing things and keeping the records forever -- would be tantamount to the server keeping the values in a transient fashion (i.e. for the duration of the request or session and then dropping them).
It's a matter of cost/benefit to the businesses, that's all. When a business can track customers cheaply and finds the data useful, they just do it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/business/attention-shopper...
Hmm no. It's just harder to do but they are working on it. Any big shop uses tons of tracking on every level. Pay by CC or use your fidelity card, facial tracking, MAC address of your phone. In London a company was providing the phone tracking service on the streets, installed on their bins, until they got shot down by the government.
Why do you think the buzz around big data exists ? Its not just for curing cancer ; its mostly to track and model individual consumer behavior.
The world on the street is exactly as cynical as the one online. It's the same world. Online it's just easier to track people even more, so they get tracked even more.