[njitbew]

I'm not sure if the author is trolling or actually presenting this as some groundbreaking insight. I thought it was obvious to anyone that no cookies means no cookie notice (and there are plenty of static websites that do this). The point is that most websites try to make money, and making money means advertisements, and advertisement (often) means tracking.

[bluGill]

Advertisement doesn't mean tracking. When someone buys a radio/TV Superbowl ad they don't track who heard/saw it. When you buy a newspaper/magazine ad you don't track who reads it. You can sometimes target a particular neighborhood, but that is all the more you get, and no tracking of who got it.

The ability to track doesn't really add that much value to most ads. The only time it is helpful is if you want to get a specific person across many different platforms. If you have a niche product that is useful, but niches generally have better ways to get their target (ie the forums frequented by their target). When someone advertises a car they don't need to track - they need to get everybody in the world because that is their potential customer base.

[mwnivek]

> The only time it is helpful is if you want to get a specific person across many different platforms.

There are surely other uses. For instance, I might want to know if my ad is being shown again to a return visitor or for the first time to a new visitor.

[brlewis]

> When someone buys a radio/TV Superbowl ad they don't track who heard/saw it

Not long ago there was a front-page HN post about Smart TVs. From a lot of the comments I gather that, at least for TV, they now do. Possibly for some forms of radio too.