The privacy I protect on the Internet is privacy from the people in my life who matter. I don’t want my boss to know if I’m looking for another job, or my girlfriend to know if I’m having an affair, or my cats to know if I really want a dog. (To my boss/girlfriend/cats: None of that is true, honest--you can check my browser history if you like.) I also don’t want complete strangers to be able to dig up intimate details of my life by plugging my name into Google (before a job interview, for example).

Advertisers don’t care about any of that. Their tracking cookies are designed to help figure out what kinds of things I’m interested in and send related ads to me. They don’t store any personally identifiable information. Nothing in there is tied to my name at all, just my Web-browsing behavior--and frankly, I doubt I’m unique when it comes to that. (“Wow”, they’ll say, “this guy doesn’t do a whole lot of work.”) Perhaps I’d change my tune if I were to see ads for therapy or loaded handguns after changing my Facebook relationship status to “Single,” but I’m honestly not too worried about Advertising Profile #9001: Young Adult Male Who Likes Computers.

2. Advertising lets people make money from the Internet: You can consume as much audio, video, and text as you want for the cost of the small coffee that gets you a spot at Starbucks. Never mind that it costs money for someone to record the audio or produce the video or write the words, and that it costs someone else money to bring it to you faster than you can physically listen/watch/read it--you can have whatever you want immediately delivered to you, free of charge. That is the promise of the Internet, and it’s a promise sustained almost entirely by advertising. Goodwill alone won’t power your Pandora’s Phil Collins Radio--the service needs money to pay the piper, which means that it needs to park a few ads there instead.

As a writer, I believe this is important, because it's how I make my living. Unless you, dear reader, are a PCWorld magazine subscriber, the only way I can afford to keep writing is to show you ads while you read this--and the same goes for most of your favorite bloggers, YouTube channels, app developers, and so on. That's pretty cool, because it means that all kinds of creative types can focus on doing interesting things without worrying too much about how to make money from it. Few people would pay money to watch a live video stream of someone playing StarCraft 2, for instance, but throw a few ads on that person's Justin.tv stream, and .

Of course, even if Do Not Track is implemented, the Internet will still have advertisements. And that leads me to my third point.