The privacy crowd are right; and so are you. This is a huge internal conflict the web today - how do you make it pay, keep it free and not have it track users?

Simple referrer information is very valuable to the Guardian (and others who sell ads), and is in most circumstances not a significant privacy leak. Cross-site tracking via third-party cookies, however, has significant privacy implications.

I would like to see a user/advertiser understanding of "this far and no further". But unfortunately the debate is sufficiently polarised I can't see any change to the current situation, where the tech-savvy disable everything and the less experienced stick with their defaults, which effectively reduces it to an arms race between the big browser manufacturers and a handful of ad networks.

The alternative is a pay-per-view service, or subscribing to wires. I haven't done any research into the viability of that type of service, but it is a paradigm shift.

The gist of this article is that users have found ways to not be tracked: this was inevitable, the person running the browser has a lot of control over what the browser sends and where.

So, that pick isn't working all the time any more.

Not entirely, no. It is funded by a trust, and part of the Guardian Media Group is an investment fund.