The core insight here: privacy isn’t this monolithic thing where you’re either completely anonymous or completely exposed. The author breaks it down into these two approaches - tracking reduction and tracking evasion - and that distinction actually matters a ton in practice. Someone worried about targeted ads has completely different needs than someone trying to avoid state-level surveillance. Both are “privacy concerns” but they’re worlds apart in terms of what you’d actually do about them.
The things that make you better at tracking reduction often make you worse at tracking evasion, and vice versa. It’s not just that they’re different approaches - they can actively undermine each other. This is the part that most privacy guides completely fail to explain, and it’s why you see people with these Frankenstein browser setups that are actually less private than if they’d just picked one coherent strategy.
There‘s also the fact that governments allow the formation of these advertising companies to thrive, because it serves their tracking+control needs. Governments dispense multiple strategies to undermine privacy in almost all scenarios that our struggles to reduce tracking are undermined by tracking enforcement. Trusting governments to cease tracking altogether is historically foolish. Thus our actions should strive for the end of surveillance, both by state, and in business.
Big words just to say: governments violate privacy. We should be against privacy violators either form they take.