The thing is, Google Analytics (as mentioned in the article) is such a pervasive ubiquitous invisible actor, but it's damn useful, so lots of people want to use it. The problem is that it's a third party object, and it's of massive benefit to Google too, not just the site owner.
Several web font services now fall into that category as well. The problem from a user's point of view is that you can block Google Analytics or Facebook Like buttons without any loss of functionality you probably wanted, but blocking Typekit or Google Web Fonts will often mess up the rendering of a page.
This changes the rules fundamentally. Before, with free services where you weren't the customer but the product, you could opt out by simply not using the service. Now, even with services where you really are the customer and maybe you really are paying for it, you can't opt out of the potentially intrusive third party service without opting out of or significantly degrading the main service you wanted to use as well.
This is a tricky area. Those third party services are pervasive precisely because they are useful to people who build the web sites that users enjoy, and if they're being given away for free, they have to fund themselves somehow. I also don't have much sympathy for people who don't load up someone's web site as it was presented to them but then complain that it doesn't look right or work properly (see also: not running JS, complaining that you can't want Flash content on your iPad, etc). In some respects, these third party services are almost certainly beneficial to users, too, because they act as CDNs that probably improve performance and lower bandwidth requirements compared to having every site self-host the same common material.
On the other hand, privacy matters. We have drifted into a situation where this kind of ubiquitous monitoring is widely used by site owners, but many of them probably don't even realise the implications for their users' privacy, or just don't care. We have rules about data protection and spamming and the like to deal with similar situations in slightly different contexts, and maybe it's time we had some rules about tracking by services that are incorporated indirectly on other people's web sites and possibly without a visitor's knowledge.
Several web font services now fall into that category as well. The problem from a user's point of view is that you can block Google Analytics or Facebook Like buttons without any loss of functionality you probably wanted, but blocking Typekit or Google Web Fonts will often mess up the rendering of a page.
This changes the rules fundamentally. Before, with free services where you weren't the customer but the product, you could opt out by simply not using the service. Now, even with services where you really are the customer and maybe you really are paying for it, you can't opt out of the potentially intrusive third party service without opting out of or significantly degrading the main service you wanted to use as well.
This is a tricky area. Those third party services are pervasive precisely because they are useful to people who build the web sites that users enjoy, and if they're being given away for free, they have to fund themselves somehow. I also don't have much sympathy for people who don't load up someone's web site as it was presented to them but then complain that it doesn't look right or work properly (see also: not running JS, complaining that you can't want Flash content on your iPad, etc). In some respects, these third party services are almost certainly beneficial to users, too, because they act as CDNs that probably improve performance and lower bandwidth requirements compared to having every site self-host the same common material.
On the other hand, privacy matters. We have drifted into a situation where this kind of ubiquitous monitoring is widely used by site owners, but many of them probably don't even realise the implications for their users' privacy, or just don't care. We have rules about data protection and spamming and the like to deal with similar situations in slightly different contexts, and maybe it's time we had some rules about tracking by services that are incorporated indirectly on other people's web sites and possibly without a visitor's knowledge.