If you are explicitly not consenting, then surely the correct way to do this is to not visit the site. If I go to a shop and want a product but don't like the price I am within my rights to refuse the contract and not buy the item. What I am not entitled to do is unilaterally change the contract, and walk out with the item without paying full price. I use an ad blocker because so many sites are barely usable without it, but I don't pretend it's a morally justifiable thing to do, and I try to disable it for sites that I use a lot, unless I pay for them.

The actual analogy is walking into a store and being forced to buy something for walking in. I don't feel the store owner should be entitled to do that.

As for moral justifiability, I find it unacceptable that a website operator can sell data about me without my consent just for following a link to their site.

Do you read the content on the website? Because in that case yes it is fair for the "store owner" to force you to pay the price.

In any other situation in society, the content owner is responsible for controlling access to the content until a price is explicitly agreed upon. An artist can’t display a painting in a public place and charge everyone whatever they want after they happen to view the painting.

I would agree, if only I were given the choice. As it is, I have no way to know what the terms of a website are until I visit. The intent of the ads are also usually not made clear. If I don't view the ad am I allowed to read the content?

I guess it boils down to what you think the Internet is. I feel I should be in control of my computer, and thus I get to decide which bits I allow onto my network and which of those bits are then rendered on my screen. If you've made content publicly available, it's mine to consume in the way I see fit. I don't see why I shouldn't, for example, be allowed to use a text based browser to view content or browse with JavaScript disabled.

Payment for content is of course difficult for websites, but I just don't feel an ad based revenue is feasible on an open web, precisely because the web is open. The platform does not support the notion of content creators implicitly dictating terms.

To extend this analogy, it's more like they have cameras in the store and you are covering them up.

Where this analogy breaks down is when those cameras start following you from store to store.

Even for in-store cameras, the store owner doesn't have free reign over what they can do with that footage, certainly under EU data protection laws.

It is more like they require you to place cameras all over yourself, and the cameras are yours, not theirs.

I don't really know if one could require this. Seems complex. But add that the cameras are hidden (you don't know they are cameras) and it becomes a very simple issue.

Data about you is not necessarily owned by you.

I don't necessarily agree fully, but even then we can discuss the morality of selling the data to trackers without informing the user, let alone not giving them a choice to opt out before viewing the content.

It is in Europe

Societal norms for theft of physical property have been fairly clear for a long time, and shared across nearly every culture (every one I’m aware of). It’s a huge leap to apply those norms to downloading and running software on your own computer.

You’re claiming that, by choosing to visit a website, I have implicitly agreed to and am obligated to download every resource and execute all code that website’s maintainers decide to include, and to do that recursively for each downloaded resource. That is preposterous. It could, for instance, obligate me to download a literally endless amount of data, which might be very expensive for me. It might also obligate me to perform limitless computation on my machine, if for instance the website includes a script to mine Bitcoins.

I try to avoid making moral arguments, but I will certainly point out logical consequences of other people’s moral arguments that to me seem absolutely ludicrous.