Privacy is an ecological concept, not a transactional one.
On a private mailing list, a friend recently asked this:
Playing devil's advocate here: what privacy are you trying to protect? Is it very important to you that websites not know what sort of products you're interested in (and if so, why)? Or is it that you simply find targeted ads annoying?
I ask as someone who spent four years trying to help websites show less annoying ads.
Below is my response (after someone else on the list said "Sorely tempted to exfiltrate the hell out of this. Can we have it on a web page please?"):
I think Eben Moglen's...