I think people like this see it as a 'win' – as if they, John Smith, have beaten the dastardly BigCorp. Whereas, in fact, the most that happens is a Junior Marketing Executive at BigCorp says "Right, that guy falls within the 0.5% of techy customers who make things difficult for us. Ah well, it's only been 80,000 of them, well within our margin for this month."
True - however, IMO, the value is in the awareness of tracking and the knowledge of how to block things as such.
Its better to know how your network operates that you rely on for your daily life than to know nothing about its internals.
My biggest issue as I age is that I FORGET how to do some of the higher level networking that I used to know innately - and I also lose interest in doing such things and become lazy, complacent, and as I forget things, more and more ignorant to it all...
Take PC Gaming as an example, or server rebuilds.
I could build SUN 650s and many many PC based servers with a blindfold on.
I grew up gaming and ran Intel's Game Development Lab for some time and was super knowledgable about all things PC/PCGaming when I had the lastest and best hardware literally delivered to me every day at intel...
Now I don't knwo shit about 'PCMasterRace' and building these days....
The issue is that people like this fetishise avoiding tracking. It doesn't seem like they have a clear reason why they want to avoid tracking. Do they have sensitive data to hide? Do they ideologically disagree with large companies gathering data? Is it anything else? It honestly doesn't seem like it. It seems more like "stopping them from getting my data" is treated as an end unto itself.
I can’t speak for everyone but there’s a growing awareness of where all the risks to society with gathering and spreading all this data.
It surprises me how someone who understands the inner workings as well as the interactions of the systems that society has increasingly expected us to depend on are not scared shitless of how things will look a generation from now.
