At the time, clickthrough/shrink wrap license agreements were not nearly as controversial/legally questionable as they are today. My thought was to just include it in the license agreement, and give users the ability to opt out in the settings. In many ways the technology actually protected privacy, and thus I (perhaps naively) viewed it more as a privacy enhancement than something sinister that needed special permission. But given their sensitivity to the issue, had they actually implemented it, I am certain they would have at least given it its own checkbox during install.

I appreciate the walk down memory lane; curious what the web would have been had it been for something client-side like that, rather than web bugs.

Better models definitely exist, and I'm convinced Brave has proposed one with great potential. Let's catch up in 10 years to discuss this again ;)