A posting <https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/golden/has-apple-doomed-ads-on-the-web-will-it-crush-google/> on “Freedom To Tinker”, which is part of my regular reading, talks about the potential implications of more widespread use of ad-blocker plugins in Web browsers. Not quite triggering an “arms race” of ad-blocker-blockers, and so on: If the use of these plugins becomes ubiquitous, only one thing would have to change – the publishers would have to insert the line of code in some way on the server side, and the ad would just look as though it came with the rest of the page. At that point, the browser plugin is useless. What would be the knock-on effects of this? The ad companies no longer have any way to track users as they move around the web. Absent some way on the ad companies’ part to implement a cross-site evercookie (which would be considered unethical and would quickly be blocked by browser authors if discovered), the ad companies will no longer have a way to connect users on one site to users on another. The ads you’d see on a given site could be based solely on the interactions you’ve had with that one site – which would be a boon to privacy. So rather than becoming worse, the ads would actually take on a less creepy form.