Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it isn't just privacy invasion that bothers me. Ridiculous screen-covering ads, bandwidth hogging, battery draining etc. But forget all that - your suggestion, to avoid a tracking cookie from the various companies in what is frankly an industry with a terrible track record for doing the right thing, is to use the NAI "don't track me" "feature"... Which requires that I accept cookies from any domain and let them p…
I work for one of the ad network. And I know the people in my company who implemented that specific piece of code for that specific opt-out feature. It's one of the most safety-critical feature we have so we do regression test before every single release regardless if we modified that code or not. So I'm pretty sure that opt-out feature works. Because if it doesn't, someone gonna sue us. I find it really hard to comm…
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, its a fucking duck. The Ad industry doesn't try to steal peoples information all the time, they successfully create very detailed profiles on people. You yourself admitted this when claiming that "only targeted advertising is effective".
> So I'm pretty sure that opt-out feature works.
...for the ad networks who are members of NAI and who abide by its guidelines... by requiring a cookie on every device I use, and requiring that every device is set to allow third-party cookies, which further increases the chances for me to be tracked online.
Ad this point, I don't need to demonstrate the shady practices of the ad industry - they do that well enough by themselves.
I don't care if you work for an ad company, and frankly I don't care if the adoption of content blocking software causes your employer to go out of business and you to lose your job. You chose to work for that company, knowing full-well what they do.
The ad industry made choices about how it would operate its business, and is now paying the consequences. Same goes for you, as an individual.