I've never been sure what to make of this argument. There are definitely lots of 'tells' that someone is restricting their visibility, most obviously disabled

I've never been sure what to make of this argument. There are definitely lots of 'tells' that someone is restricting their visibility, most obviously disabled JS. And I'm acutely aware that those things mark a person as interesting to corporate tracking, in the same way that searching for Tor and Tails flags people for government tracking. But it's hard for me to believe that the tradeoff isn't worth it. First, because automated surveillance happens in bulk: not standing out from the crowd is no longer proof against observation. (The Panopticon metaphor is if anything behind the times; that only created the fear of constant visibility, not the reality of it.) Second, because it's not clear to me that corporations take more interest in obfuscated users. Not only do they take more effort and overhead to fingerprint, they're quite likely to be worse business prospects. Using a VPN tells governments you're up to something interesting, but using uBlock tells ad networks that... I hate ads and am unlikely to click on them. In general, I expect that obfuscation signals that someone is a bad target for advertising and provides minimal information about their value as a customer service recipient. That said, I've been expecting for years now that somebody will get cute and start profiling privacy-aware users for separate targeting. If they've got JS disabled and Firefox up to date and sending DNT, maybe it'd be more profitable to replace tracked JS ads with text-only TripleByte ads or something?