> Hey, didn't mean to be brash about it, just being honest so you know how it works.

I tried to respond with a mild tone. I get it. I do not blame you, and I do appreciate your honesty and good amount of technical detail. I just get tired of this general tact, by no means your specific words, that tracking is inevitable you cannot stop it. We have made this culture, and I for one want it gone. I will not people just accept in a public, specifically HN, if I have energy to oppose it.

>The ad networks do care about this since it's still lost revenue, but our effect is minimized because we often have much bigger reach than just a few sites and can still serve plenty of ads across the entire web. There is an arms race and the big companies just pay to play. Remember the adblock plugins are usually made by for-profit corporations who will grant exceptions for cash so take from that what you will.

Touche. I had since moved away from the obvious culprits (AdBlock in all variants, disconnect.me) and only use uBlock when I have to allow all through NoScript, as I need content off a website that only renders text content with many CDN's and junk enabled (not all former are the latter, but there is overlap). Now, I can tell default whitelist from NoScript is bought off, so I remove a lot of it from the beginning and set more aggressive defaults by browsing a few comments sites and turning everything off beyond what is necessary. So I am well aware of that, and try to stick to what I think is right, not trusting adblockers primarily, but NoScript and redirecting many malicious ad and bot networks to my hosts file on my local computer and running a blank webpage. As others have noted, my browsing performance is better and my experience cleaner.

I know by virtue of your interest you do not have that scummy level of ad that necessitates my use of these things, but how can I know to trust you over thousands of companies without auditing all of you?

> As for privacy, I have to ask first, what are you trying to accomplish? Remember you can either have accurate ads best fit for you or have complete privacy. We can't show you stuff that's relevant without tracking, that's just reality. I can't reveal too much but networks usually start tracking with cookies and some more advanced methods by themselves but as they get bigger, we outsource a lot of the tracking to 3rd party companies who are very good at this. There are lots of browser and device fingerprinting technologies and other information that you give off just to visit and render a site that we can use. Even the internet carriers themselves participate in this and you can't really hide from them since most people just have 1 connection. Proxy services will help but again you're sacrificing a lot of convenience and speed for what? To stick it to us? Unless you're running adblockers, we'll just end up serving you generic ads anyway and still tracking as best we can.

I want security and my internet profile, even anonymized, used to facilitate garbage I do not approve of. To be honest, I am sure your company products are not who I am worried about. But I think I have to not run interactive content using any form of code you send to my machine without express authorization because most self-respecting computer enthusiasts no what that means. Now if only ad distributors and web apps had centralized repos of JS content, even obfuscated, signed from a central repository that browsers could turn and off like yum/apt/zypper repos, I would been in love (yes, I know this is a joke and pipe dream).

I know some clients of your industry feel strongly about this, and prevent me from viewing any page without JS, for ads and otherwise. There is a balance, and I will walk it. But as an IT tech of approaching 10 years, I trust no dynamic content in the browser unless I can load the page without it first. Even I have potentially infected my computer according to work IDS tools. Me, and you can see unlike 98% of our userbase, I actually care and pay attention. You better be damn sure I can read text, or it must be a very legit site for my purposes (Github, Reddit, I even disable HN bc they are one of a handful sites I use without JS ever enabled, I loved you for it HN). I wish it was altruism, but it is really functionality. I can handle ads, within reason. But should my belief that potentially malicious hot-loaded content is a concern I am not willing to fight for in court? I have plenty of broken computers in my office to attest to that.

> I think there's a massive misconception on what exactly you're protecting yourself from. Most user profiles are removed after 15-30-60 days as it becomes stale. We don't collect personally identifying information (but facebook does), we don't track searches (but google does), and it's all just anonymized identifiers. Beyond that, we can always just ask the big data collecting agencies for more information to make a decision without actually collecting/storing anything ourselves (stuff like purchase histories) so you're not giving up much there either. I do understand the battle for privacy but in lots of situations, the issues are overblown if you want my honest opinion.

I think yes, I owe you a concession. But I want to be clear, the big fish in this giant ocean are destroying the tolerance we have for operations like yourself: small-pond fish trying to make it big. I do not trust the FB, Google, or Social Anything. I try to browse Google search results with static HTML if possible (now using DDG HTML only results more often, or using it as a Google proxy with !g redirect on queries), I hardly ever enable the CDNs or ajaxapis.g.c utility servers on pages on less absolutely necessary since we know they probably store such data in diagnostic logs for decades to come, legal or extra-legally.

In the age of secret warrants, why do I need to give you the benefit of the doubt? I mean, your industry, will all due respect, sells market items; it does not cure cancer. At a philosophical level (I know this is not where your appeal comes from), why should I trust you? Other people I trust less than you will petition you for your much larger competitor's data and build a public internet profile of what I am up to. What will stop you from ending up in their dragnet 5-10 years from now?

Keep in mind I live in the Arab World. I am no prude, but even AdWords, for personal and work computers I see daily on many sites, show giant billboard sidebar ads saying Meet Qatari Singles (in of itself hilarious) with women with large breasts and generous cleavage. I see this even on computers with veiled women working at them. Even I find this messed up. When people are on my computer, it makes me look like a sketchball. If I have to quick search sites at someone's desk to research a problem I have not seen before and stumble upon this crap, how do I look? The extremes of the industry bring good eggs like you down, even the most elite of them. How should I filter you guys? This is a hard problem. I ask rhetorically.

Now, if you write an industry rag shame practices and starting to list good example/bad example companies, I wouldl love to read it, as I will know how selective I should be with my filtering. But for the time being, NoScript on, default Google stuff removed (yes you are right after), and cynicism in full swing.