The average person probably won't notice or care otherwise this would be a much more publicized issue. The average person also doesn't care that their refrigerator and television phone home, their calls and data are slurped up by the NSA, and their location can be tracked through their cell phone and vehicle movements.

However, just because the average person doesn't notice and doesn't care, it doesn't mean that their life can't be ruined at some point because of these things. You never know when you're suddenly going to be targeted for something you may or may not have done.

People being untrackable in general ensures that folks who need to be untrackable are more easily able to achieve that goal --- the world is a much darker place if journalists are hindered in researching stories.

This tracking absolutely has impacted the average person. Have you noticed how addictive the social media algorithms are today? Pretty much everyone I know struggles to get off their recommended or "for you" tab at this point. It literally is rooted in tracking how long you spend on each piece of media, rewarding and delaying that reward based on what will hook you the most. If you start disabling tracking and anonymizing your browser, it suddenly all becomes really clear how unnecessary the content really is...

I think about this sometimes as I do a lot of things attempt to protect my privacy and keep control of what I’m paying attention to (ie not doom scrolling / shorts, carefully controlling notifications). So I make a lot of sacrifices including my time in order to maintain control over my technology.

I think it’s not possible for me to say if my life is really better, because it’s the whole road not taken thing. It’s not possible to know and so it’s not worth agonising over, but I’m choosing to live according to my values at least, and that seems valuable.

> nobody ever brags about how lack of “tracking” has positively impacted their lives

This reminds me of the anti-vax logic a tad in that they lack the imagination on the seemingly obvious effects of their ideal world.

Being indifferent to companies and political parties (which becomes your Gov't when voted into power) indirectly states that you are indifferent to others attempts to influence you and/or foolhardy enough to believe that all of your beliefs consistently originates from objective personal experience.

Whether or not they would enjoy a better life doesn’t matter if there’s no way to avoid your assumed preferences being tied to your devices, and for it to know the preferences of those you spend time with, those you work with, where you go, etc.

Though, from what I understand, overall the fingerprinting success rate is only about 30%.

One time fingerprinting, sure. But if you collate tracking info from a hundred sources or so, you pretty much have person, name, email, and location.

Is this before or after ICE became a $150B secret paramilitary beholden to a corrupt authoritarian with a large cohort of sycophantic tech billionaires?

I’m not an illegal immigrant so I’m not worried about it

Neither are many of the people ICE has beaten and detained, didn't save them, won't save you.

That is short-sighted for many reasons that I don't need to mention.

I have one! Because of my anti-tracking measures, all social media platforms still don't seem to have a profile on me for content preferences, and so fail to show me the hyper-curated slop they do to everyone else. What I see instead is a classic feed of the best content generally trending across the world, pre-2010 style. That's one way it has impacted my life.

Another way is the security and peace of mind it gives me while living in a country that has a behemoth population of bad actors online. Everyone I know has fallen to at least one targeted cyber-scam or the other. I haven't.