(Disclosure: I've spent most of my career in digital media)

Taking a step back with this article, I think there's a few things going on here. There's clearly frustration with the extent to which people are tracked (often without their knowledge), and I don't disagree with that at all. Then there's the point of "well, is that extra data actually paying off to be worth the negative brand perception and invasiveness?" And the answer there totally depends on whom you ask and how you ask that question.

Taking an even further step back I can say that the entire point of advertising is and has always been to get a message in front of a target audience, whether it is driving sales, retaining customers, fending off competitors, promoting a non-profit cause, etc.

There are many channels to do that these days, and advertisers constantly struggle with the question of "is this meeting our objectives?" The joke about not knowing which 50% of your ad spend is being wasted is very much alive and well today in a world the availability of data has vastly outpaced the mainstream advertiser's ability to harness it. So I'd say overall, the answer to the question around whether the extra tracking is worth it is largely a question mark when you get into the nitty gritty of it.

If someone asked me what the hardest part of my job was, I would say it is determining what the contribution was of a given channel/campaign/placement/keyword/ad/etc. to my end goals, ie. attribution. The display industry is massive and make no mistake, we've come a long way in terms of understanding effectiveness. Ultimately though, most advertisers who do any sort of branding campaigns will tell you that they don't know definitively what value that contributed if you hold their feet to the fire on questions around attribution. Did the personalized ecommerce retargeting ad really remind them to buy or would they have done so anyway? What's the value of a view-through conversion? If a video pre-roll unit autoplays without sound, what is its value compared to a user-initiated play? Etc.

I say all of this not as an excuse (our industry has many issues, make no mistake), but to highlight the fact that as an advertiser, I honestly wish at times that it was as simple as the old glory days of Madison Avenue where the creatives ruled the roost. Heck, I'd even be ok with the days before people realized the shortcomings of last-touch attribution what with ignorance being bliss and all that.

As an advertiser, I don't want to spend my dollars where they are not effective. I also don't want to piss people off with it. I recognize that is a hard line to walk and you can never please everyone. That said, I don't see things going away or drastically changing on the data collection side. There are enough companies who have conclusively determined that this is a more effective approach for them than not using the data. It will take either some revelation that their data is a lie and it is NOT in fact working, or it will take policy and legal action to get them to stop.

The broader question should be around finding other business models that work, and trying to find new approaches that remove ads from the picture. People will vote with their wallets figuratively and literally, even if they disagree with you.

For those that hate people like me and my industry on principle, the current approach of finding technological solutions to limit data is a great start, and I can't blame people for using them one bit. I can't say we'll ever see eye to eye, but I can say that I respect your opinion because the industry as a whole has not done a great job of earning your trust. I wonder if people felt the same way back in the days of Madison Avenue when ads first started encroaching on more and more media channels (despite the fact that many media channels only grew to their current popularity BECAUSE of advertising).