Here’s an idea; what if we could assign our own tracking agent and they could provide tracking info but only on a real-time basis and only for serving ads? We’d each select our respective agent based on the balance of services and privacy they offered. Care little about tracking; get lots of free schwag. Care a lot about tracking; pay the agent to safeguard your privacy for a trivial amount like maybe $10/year. It would have to be legislated to that people can’t track any information for advertising w/o explicit user approval, but it might be an interesting approach.

That said, I’m commenting primarily because of Dan McDole’s comment. It made me wonder if a website that uses advertising revenue to support content generation can tell when a user is blocking ads. I mean people who use ad block are using resources and access content that has economic value designed to be monetized by advertising but they won’t even allow simple ads to be displayed while they browse. In essence those users are annoying and intrusive to a company that is trying to operate profitably in a dog-eat-dog medium; why shouldn’t a site block those users from viewing their content?

I’ll have to ponder this one a bit more…