I can see a future where safe browsing of the web will only be possible through some sort of whitelisting. Search engines or crowdsourced lists will exist to tell you which places you should or shouldn't go in the web based on Ads or tracking features, just like you can find out the relatively few places that serve Vegan or Kosher food.
This isn't exactly a great future but we need to accept that nowadays most people don't care about tracking or ads. This might change one day, but it's the status quo.
I think that anti-ads and anti-tracking, if trying to work alongside the full feature set of the Internet, is fighting a honorable but eventually losing war. Even if someone sorts out this particular issue, you are still tracked by 1) Your ISP and 2) other subtle client fingerprinting technologies. You can use Tor/VPN/disable JS but all of these have downsides.
All we can do is to fight with our time and wallets by not visiting places that don't support our values. This is possible and not different from the world we live in already.
Next step in ad blocking is using local trained AI to figure out what is an ad and what is not based on the content that it shows (regardless of origin).
May be more of a challenge with trackers as they don't to show ads per se, but may be the same technique can be used with "randomly" generated URLs - train an AI to dynamically make a guess whether the sub-___domain (even first party) is a tracker or not. There may not be a clear marker, but there is always a pattern...
Interesting idea, I like the sound of that.
Currently I use uBlock Origin's "Block Element" function to block "non-ad" components of websites that bother me (HN orange top bar for example). Something similar that was "trained" based on my/crowd input would be an interesting start.
> I can see a future where safe browsing of the web will only be possible through some sort of whitelisting.
Which is unfortunate, because it's already started that many places won't even render plain text without javascript.
> I think that anti-blocking and anti-tracking, if trying to work alongside the full feature set of the Internet, is fighting a honorable but eventually losing war.
For me it's less about "tracking" and more about tracking with aggregation. Self-hosted things like AWStat and Matomo (formerly Piwik) are fine in my book. It's bringing together those analytics across different sites which is problematic.
This isn't exactly a great future but we need to accept that nowadays most people don't care about tracking or ads. This might change one day, but it's the status quo.
I think that anti-ads and anti-tracking, if trying to work alongside the full feature set of the Internet, is fighting a honorable but eventually losing war. Even if someone sorts out this particular issue, you are still tracked by 1) Your ISP and 2) other subtle client fingerprinting technologies. You can use Tor/VPN/disable JS but all of these have downsides.
All we can do is to fight with our time and wallets by not visiting places that don't support our values. This is possible and not different from the world we live in already.