[djcapelis]

Given that they are in fact exchanging his privacy for money, I'm not sure your assertion holds... perhaps the poster is being over-dramatic about it, but I don't see how they're not selling privacy to some extent.

Selling people's privacy is part of an ad company's revenue stream. Ad networks pay sites to post ads. Sites make money, in part, from selling their user's privacy.

One can quibble whether or not this is a big deal, but I don't think one can say it simply doesn't happen.

[ErrantX]

It doesn't really happen though; to sell privacy you have to remove a portion of it to sell.

Now we can argue the semantics of whether the act of visiting a website is considered private knowledge. I'd argue not - it's like walking into a shop, the shop has the right to say "hey you know who was here earlier?". But at the end of the day "they are selling my privacy" is over dramatizing what is happening. By visiting any website you run the risk - how do you know they are not selling the IP logs directly etc.

Visiting websites is just, within reason, public knowledge.

I also wonder how many advertisers actually use the data to target ads - and how much of it is used simply for numbers tracking (I dont know either way but it would be interested to see). I mention this because, when I run w/o ad blockers I don't really see anything actively targeted at me.

This incessant use of the word "privacy" in contexts where it doesn't really apply frustrates me: because it dumbs down situations where privacy is actually affected.

[BrandonM]

The point is not a single visit to a single site. When you have a large ad network advertising all across the web, they are serving you ads on all kinds of sites. A big enough ad provider (think doubleclick or google) gets to see every site you visit and what order you visit them in. They know what times and what days you browse. If that's not an invasion of privacy, then it's at least akin to stalking.

Regardless of what you call it I'm not comfortable with it, and I'm not going to disable my ad blocker any time soon. The only reason I even went to ars technica was to read this article; I'll be happy to not return.

[prodigal_erik]

In fact there is an entire sub-industry of behavioral targeting information brokers out there, reselling your history to ad networks who don't have enough data about you in their own logs.