Every time I get on my tracking and internet privacy soapbox, and I lament how little people care about it these days, I need to cast my mind back to when I was a teenager and everyone wanted a counter on their homepage. Not all hosts provided a counter script in their cgi-bin so various third-party websites offered counter image links that you could add into your page. Of course when you clicked through you could see all the different countries of your site's visitors and it was the coolest thing ever. I was thrilled when I hit 1000 visitors at some point! But looking back, even if a few of those third-party counter providers were just benevolent sysadmins offering a public service, I have no doubt some of them turned into the data mining giants of today.

To be fair, Geocities did get done by the FTC for secretly selling users' PII to third-party advertisers almost 30 years ago, so it wasn't just our own faults. But I think rather than the FTC actually putting a stop to the behavior, the outcome was just that websites had be more honest in their EULA that users would be giving up their privacy rights, so here we are.