> Sadly, this still doesn't do anything to show me that I should opt out.Then don't. No need to be sad about it.
> I, as an individual, am not going to have any effect on a business if I opt out or not. No business decision is going to be made because I opt out.
I do it more from a point of view of principal. I don't want following around the Internet by all and sundry who care to, any more than I want to be followed down a dar alley, for followed into Tesco by someone yelling “hey, Dave, I saw you went to the pub last night, my shop has some cheap spirits” or “hey, Dave, I saw you but a network switch the other week, do you want another one?”.
I also resist anything wrapped in many layers of dark patterns, and that describes almost all current ad tech.
> You might argue that it will matter if enough of us do it. Sure, that is true... but again, it won't matter if I do it or not. If N number of people opting out is enough to ruin the business model, then N-1 is surely enough as well. There is a 0% chance that I am the one who finally causes the system to collapse.
If your stats knowledge and reasoning accept that, then I've got an infinite compression scheme for you. It can compress anything including compressed anythings!
You are jumping between two factors of large numbers haphazardly from sentence fragment to sentence fragment, and the logic isn't following you. At some point N-1 might make a difference, and you could be that -1.
> I do use an ad blocker, and never click on ads.
To use your argument on tracking: but many people don't, so why do you bother? What makes you think you could be the +1/-1 here but not there? And by blocking ads you are blocking a fair portion of the tracking, in fact that is why I block ads much more than the ads themselves. I don't run sponsorblock for the other side of the same reason: that doesn't affect tracking at all.
> If having more information about me allows the website to charge more to show me an ad, and I never click any ads, then I am hopefully helping decrease the return advertisers get by using personal information.
And when the database eventually leaks, many others will have the extra information about you.
And again: by blocking the ads using most ad blockers (obs not all work the same ways) you are blocking at least some tracking.
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But again, if you don't want to block tracking, don't. No need to be sad that we've not convinced you with our arguments as to why we try to block it. I know other devs who take your attitude (that is simply isn't worth their effort), and many others who take mine or similar (when it isn't worth the effort, the information or product behind the mountain of “legitimate interest” checkboxes isn't worth the effort either so I'll just move on). Our threat and principal models can be different from ours without either of us being bothered by the other's choices here.