While people have become more privacy conscious, as far as I can tell it hasn’t actually had any effect on an appreciable amount of user’s habits (well, at leas

While people have become more privacy conscious, as far as I can tell it hasn’t actually had any effect on an appreciable amount of user’s habits (well, at least we’ve gone from 15% to 25% of users using an ad blocker in the last 5 years). Either people say the care but in actuality have it lower on their priority list than things like the web working smoothly and getting things for free, or consumers feel hopeless to actually have any control over the situation and are hoping for government intervention. (I personally lean towards the issue being that it’s hard to beat free. While theoretically people might pay 6 bucks a year for a facebook style service if it existed, network effects make getting such a service started close to impossible. Such maps out to all the free stuff supported by advertising.) I agree with the general consensus of this thread that gathering stats for website specific use isn’t an issue, and that the issue is the big aggregators like google and facebook that are plugged into websites everywhere. The big thing I don’t have the numbers for is how refusing to use a google style service impacts ad revenue. About 15 minutes of searching hasn’t gotten me any closer to figuring it out either.