Right now it has a shadowy reputation because the only people who require that feature are criminals. A few of those are committing crimes against unjust laws, but they are badly outnumbered by widely-disapproved-of behavior.
The anonymity comes with a cost. Tracking makes for a smoother web experience for most people.
So it's a hard sell to say, "Hey, you should do this thing that makes your life harder, in order to help disguise criminals". There's good reason to think that ordinary people should take better care of their privacy, even if they don't realize it, but I don't think that they're itching to apply a technology that has a "shadowy reputation" for a reason.
If everything is cost-benefit right down to atoms and energy, damn any principles, then what's the point? I'd rather take a stand for my privacy than make my life inconsequentially easier by assisting yet another questionable online service with tracking info. I highly doubt that info is as ubiquitously necessary as is asserted.
I agree that most people don't care, but "Tracking makes for a smoother web experience for most people" is just nonsense - tracking slows down almost every single web page that uses it!
Can you please explain how is tracking making a smoother web experience for me? I mean really, what context am I missing here, that I can't grasp your statement?
Also not having to constantly perform CAPTCHAs. A lot of web sites are happy to provide service for free, but don't want it bombarded with bots. They can record you to ascertain that you behave like a human, at a cost to privacy. Faced with privacy-preserving tools like TOR, they revert to inconveniences like CAPTCHA.
Right now it has a shadowy reputation because the only people who require that feature are criminals. A few of those are committing crimes against unjust laws, but they are badly outnumbered by widely-disapproved-of behavior.
The anonymity comes with a cost. Tracking makes for a smoother web experience for most people.
So it's a hard sell to say, "Hey, you should do this thing that makes your life harder, in order to help disguise criminals". There's good reason to think that ordinary people should take better care of their privacy, even if they don't realize it, but I don't think that they're itching to apply a technology that has a "shadowy reputation" for a reason.