Jeremy Keith:

I’d love to see the rejection of third-party JavaScript normalised in the same way. I know that it would make my life as a developer harder. But that’s of lesser importance. It would be better for the web.

I agree with this wisdom wholeheartedly. The current design of this website serves fonts and external JS libraries, their tracking scripts and who knows what else; I should spend some time realigning the design and assets to my values on privacy and performance.

While agree with Jeremy personally on this point, would it not be just as true that without these particular keys to the kingdom that cross-site tracking might find new methods of doing just that? Perhaps baked into your favourite WordPress extension, or into your hosting provider's platform. There are clear societal goods from making surveillance and tracking more difficult, I'm not arguing otherwise, but it's not clear to me that the motivation to track is going away, either. I mean how else is the vast majority of the open Internet being funded?

I also wonder if that future is already evolving into view as more people are introduced to privacy focused browsers and blocking scripts. “Necessity” is after all the mother of all invention.

Does cross-site tracking move deeper into the stack? Say into a network of WordPress plugins? Or into your hosting provider's platform? Do tracking companies subsidise your website hosting bill in return for a bit of user data?