Advertising worked fine before tracking. Selling your users data, especially this kind of data is a thing that more than negates the value your users derived from your service, in some places it might get you killed.
There are many ways for websites and apps to make money, and if you can't then maybe you simply shouldn't.
Advertising without tracking doesn't work. Only a small set of businesses can really advertise online without tracking. Any business that is in a specific area or doesn't use English will find it a bad deal, because most of their ads will be shown to people who don't understand the language or aren't in the area.
Even with tracking ads get the language component wrong frequently. Unskippable ads in a language you can't understand is even worse than normal.
Many billions of dollars are spent annually on advertising without tracking: every ad in print and the vast bulk of all radio and TV advertising are not tracked at all. The web was the first medium were advertising tracking could be done and it is simply an arms race, if everybody stopped doing it then it would work just as well as it does today (and it would be a damn sight less annoying).
Moreover, the benefits of tracking for advertising are yet to be proven. Can't find it on mobile, but there have already been businesses giving up an tracked advertising because it had all the efficacy of shouting in a sandstorm.
>Selling your users data, especially this kind of data is a thing that more than negates the value your users derived from your service, in some places it might get you killed.
There are many ways for websites and apps to make money, and if you can't then maybe you simply shouldn't.
This is too general of a statement. The majority of people in the US don't care about digital privacy and do get positive value.
There are many ways for websites and apps to make money, and if you can't then maybe you simply shouldn't.