Great business model, terrible for privacy advocates.
Is it really?
Nice to see some staff around. Assuming you are correct, it is also safe to assume that a privacy advocate is using adblocking software, or has set the DoNotTrack header, and thus doesn't *want* their data protected, because they don't want people collecting their data at all and are making efforts to make this happen.
The problem, however, is that even with AdBlock, and DoNotTrack the end user runs into two issues which are almost insurmountable for the user experience.
1. The user can still be tracked by script, which is where NoScript comes in, unfortunately the lack of scripts makes a large number of websites unusable, and significantly degrades the user experience. More so when, like I suggested initially, most sites are hosting their script files with any third party.
Which leads me to 2. Even with script blocking enabled, there are still cookies to consider, and the same problems arise when attempting to access most websites.
So the average user can not concern themselves too much with privacy, not so much by choice, but because if they do they can't do all the things their friends are doing - youtube videos, the escapistmagazine (who need about 9 different hosts bypassed in NoScript to make their site *work* and are representative of a non-google entity), and the like all become effectively unusable by a group of people who are not highly technically minded.
I suggested originally that there are people who successfully browse the internet in a "private" fashion. Their selection of privacy usually means: Use a search engine that is inferior to google (because most of them are - and the term "google it" is being used even by clients of mine who use bing exclusively). Have a web browsing experience that is noticeably slower (Tor), or one that is noticeably "broken" (NoScript, No Cookies). AdBlock is about the only piece of software that sits, nicely, in the background relatively unobtrusively.
So, to sum up as it were, for the end user the business policy is excellent. They get a great web experience at the compromise of (a limited amount of?) their privacy, corporations have to use less bandwidth, web designers have to host less files, etc. etc. The privacy advocate gets an inferior experience because taking advantage of these features means their web traffic is monitored very closely in the name of better targeted ads.
Note: AdBlock means I don't get targeted ads (except in gmail), and google's work means I get web search results that are relevant to me. I love that it works like that, just pointing out the other side.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan