I honestly don't mind being tracked. I don't know if it's just me but I prefer targeted advertising than just generic one. It's always more relevant and I do end up purchasing. Without tracking, there would be no targeted advertising.
You're assuming that advertising is the correct or only business strategy. I wouldn't mind getting tracked, if I felt that I could trust the companies collecting data about me, or perhaps just get access to it.
Honestly I don't see the value of tracking though. I tried running my browser without Ghostery recently. The "tracked" ads are generally pretty poorly targeted. I got a lot of ads for TransIP after browsing their price plans, but that's sort of the wrong time, at this point I'm already aware of them.
Amazons recommendations are pretty good for books, but not much more than that and that's despite them having huge amounts of data.
So why the need to track me, if you can't do anything useful with it?
And it's getting better and better. Recommendation for books is much easier in that context since you have a hard sale and can compare to other hard sales.. and not assumptions based on visits.
There are ways to do targeted advertising without tracking. For example, you could identify clusters and then have users' browsers do the lifting to determine what cluster they belong in.
Exactly! Or for that matter have clients develop handles for themselves on topics they want, and the advertisers just Multicast the relevant information to the users that have those tags. No need to GUID tracking.
