Concrete-ish but still simple simple version: If you visit example.com, close the tab, and then load a page with an ad on it, both parties would love to show you an ad for whatever example.com is selling. If example.com has a tracking pixel for the ad domain, then this is trivial to make happen.
OK, I understand privacy concerns with actually private information like name/address/email/etc. But a tracking pixel for ads? Why is this a concern? Since when?
Would it be so bad if people actually worked their brains a bit and got smarter with online advertising (and lots of other stuff)?
This looks suspiciously like the situation with obesity. Instead of eating less to lose weight, and eating fresh to stay healthy, people just blame "the corporations" for all their troubles.
Seems to me like it's counterproductive. Just put up safety nets for people because they can't control themselves. What do you end up with? A bunch of impulsive idiots and a few organizations with way too much control over them.
This is reality as I see it. You can be offended if you want, but I'd suggest you learn not to be offended by some words on a screen. That of course requires responsibility, which is free but I can sell it to you for $99/month if you want.
No one is suggesting advertisers tracking you is bad because people "can't control themselves." People don't like being tracked because, over time, private information can be inferred from your viewing history. Things like your age, gender, relationship status, income, ethnicity, education, hobbies, health concerns, diet, voting preferences, family names, etc. can all be known about you with high certainty simply by having trackers on the sites you visit. Ironically, this is exactly the kind of data you understand being concerned about before making several bad faith assumptions about why people don't want to be tracked.
