newspapers, have done just fine without it for several hundred years. Radio and TV likewise can't do it.

Duck Duck Go doesn't use it and they do okay. There is a lot more money in surveillance based advertising, but it isn't the only way.

> Duck Duck Go doesn't use it and they do okay.

Right. My point was FB/Google would cease to exist in their current form employing hundreds of thousands of ppl and responsible for US tech domination.

Would we as a society ok with losing all that and turning FB into a 100 ppl company that no one cares about.

It hasn't been technologically possible until recently, and now that it is, businesses are strongly incentivized to use it, in order to keep up with the growth of competitors that do used tracked advertising.

Privacy-focused mass-market products like DDG and Firefox will very rarely be able to keep up with the giants that prioritize profit. As long as users disregard their privacy, there'll be businesses ready to entice them with customized features, and of course advertisers will reward that too. That's why regulation is the only real way out (GDPR, etc.).

This isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. Tracking-based advertising isn't used out of necessity any more often than negotiating a $200k TC increase is. It's about maximizing profit, not simply about sustained survival.