For targeting advertising expendatures at the site level. If most of my traffic, as revealed by referrer links, comes from social-media-platform-foo and only a little from social-media-platform-bar, then I am likely to spend more on ads from foo than from bar. I'll grant that it is a noisy measure, but doesn't need to be about tracking a particular individual.
Businesses survived just fine before this. Do personalised ads earn more money? Maybe. But they're invasive and if the governments bowed down to the people instead of corporations they'd be just as illegal as stalking a potential customer to harass them when they're most likely to see you
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The fact sites do evil things with these headers is why I configure Firefox with
set to 2. It "breaks" sites, but often in good ways (such as the site in TFA).Referrer links are a dumb idea. Why the hell do you want to know where I'm coming from other than to track me
For targeting advertising expendatures at the site level. If most of my traffic, as revealed by referrer links, comes from social-media-platform-foo and only a little from social-media-platform-bar, then I am likely to spend more on ads from foo than from bar. I'll grant that it is a noisy measure, but doesn't need to be about tracking a particular individual.
Businesses survived just fine before this. Do personalised ads earn more money? Maybe. But they're invasive and if the governments bowed down to the people instead of corporations they'd be just as illegal as stalking a potential customer to harass them when they're most likely to see you
Got same issue with Edge, but works with Firefox :)