> Most users seem to not care about ad tech/tracking

Most people don't understand that they're being tracked. The ones that do generally don't understand to what extent.

You tend to get one of two responses: surprise or apathy. When people say "what are you going to do?" They don't mean "I don't care" they mean "I feel powerless to do anything about it, so I'll convince myself to not care or think about it". Honestly, the interpretation is fairly similar for when people say "but my data isn't useful" or "so what, they sell me ads (I use an ad blocker)". Those responses are mental defenses to reduce cognitive overload.

If you don't buy my belief then reframe the question to make things more apparent. Instead asking people how they feel about Google or Meta tracking them, ask how they feel about the government or some random person. "Would you be okay if I hired a PI to follow you around all day? They'll record who you talk to, when, how long, where you go, what you do, what you say, when you sleep, and everything down to what you ate for breakfast." The number of people that are going to be okay with that will plummet. As soon as you change it from "Meta" to "some guy named Mark". You'll still get nervous jokes of "you're wasting money, I'm boring" but you think they wouldn't get upset if you actually hired a PI to do that?

The problem is people don't actually understand what's being recorded and what can be done with that information. If they did they'd be outraged because we're well beyond what 1984 proposed. In 1984 the government wasn't always watching. The premise was more about a country wide Panopticon. The government could be watching at any time. We're well past that. Not only can the government and corporations do that but they can look up historical records and some data is always being recorded.

So the reason I don't buy the argument is because 1984 is so well known. If people didn't care, no one would know about that book. The problem is people still think we're headed towards 1984 and don't realize we're 20 years into that world

In my experience those users express a mix of surprise and irritation when they get ads about something they did minutes or hours before, but they accept that's the way things are.

I joke that I'm a no-app person, because I install very few apps and I use anti tracking tech on my phone that's even hard to explain or recommend to non technical friends. I use Firefox with uMatrix and uBlock Origin and Blockada. uMatrix is effective but breaks so many sites unless one invests time in playing with the matrix. Blockada breaks many important apps (banking) less one understands whitelisting.

Instead of trying convince-by-assertion, maybe you could try offering an actual objection to the argument raised up-thread?

On what basis do you claim that software developers, who did not establish a means of for third parties to get a stable identifier, nevertheless intended that fingerprinting techniques should work?

How would you frame it?

The inverse is also true, letting them whitewash their image by pretending they care about your privacy and seek to protect you will be good for their public relations, but only if we let them. I refuse to be this gullible and run to their defense for no apparent reason.