> From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best but at their pres

> From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best but at their present scale this small improvement would mean a lot of money, wouldn't it? Lots of businesses find that it is harder to get significant gains (i think they call that the 'law of diminishing returns'), however the stock market is demanding steady growth figures. i guess location data is important for targeting of local services: you can't push an add for a specific restaurant to a person living in a different city; now if you know that he may be going to that city, then that's a slightly different thing. I think the alternative to all this tracking would be to push more yellow page directories like DMOZ or jasmine directories, but I don't know if you could do that in practice. Another direction would be to push a directory of specialized search engines, like duckduckgo bang! operators (shameless plug: here is my directory of these https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html )