I can't see how the online business can afford to allow Do Not Track. Put the other way: you can only have gmail if you agree hand over your personal information to Google.
Put the other way: you can only have gmail if you agree hand over your personal information to Google.
That would be soo awesome!
Also, from where comes this belief that tracking generates such an absurd amount of money? It must be some sort of "it will be valuable in the future" thinking going on because today it can't mean much.
IF tracking was so effective it would be something that the customer wanted (and there you have it - that's how the online business will survive, by actually producing something that the customer wants). Now it's just sad and the only real feature of tracking and content aware ads is that when there have been an ax murder you will get a discount on axes - which is so bad it is kind of funny.
This thing about discount on axes would likely still happen without tracking. Tracking in itself will allow to do things like do frequency capping (do not want to display the same ad 400 times to the same person), give higher values to displaying ads many times (second time is worth more!), or to display ads to someone we know has visited one of the ads' customer websites.
The general idea is to be able to do this kind of regrouping, and it is, for all purposes, anonymous past what a browser can usually send (IP addresses allowing to derive geographical location) unless you try to use tracking to generate some very precise information on a user. This is generally useless to do because real information will come from third parties and you don't need to do all that work by yourself.
That is to say, I'm much more worried about a company like google doing tracking when they know my mobile phone number, age, gender, name, occupation, etc. Than any third-party tracking business that will pretty much never know these things for sure, except when a business like Google or Facebook will tell them about it.
In general though, all of this tracking is much less worse than whatever use of a credit card I make, given they openly do much more invasive searches and can do far more with this information than most online businesses, limited to displaying ads that might or might not fit my likings better.
Even if you don't use tracking for advertising targeting, a lot of untargeted / contextually-targeted ad buys require frequency caps. No frequency caps, no ad buys.
You seem skeptical that ad targeting works. In fact, it works pretty well. Not perfect, could be better, but it's certainly profitable.
They just wouldn't want to because it would cut into their profit margin. It's not like they couldn't sell ads directed at the non-tracked people, they'd just be less targeted ads. There's still money in it.
That would be soo awesome!
Also, from where comes this belief that tracking generates such an absurd amount of money? It must be some sort of "it will be valuable in the future" thinking going on because today it can't mean much.
IF tracking was so effective it would be something that the customer wanted (and there you have it - that's how the online business will survive, by actually producing something that the customer wants). Now it's just sad and the only real feature of tracking and content aware ads is that when there have been an ax murder you will get a discount on axes - which is so bad it is kind of funny.