> If they didn't then there would be no website for you to complain about.

Oh no, my business model of selling everything I can glean about you in exchange for some recycled 'content' is under threat! Oh noes!

If you can't operate without tracking and you can't legitimately and consensually persuade people to participate in it without resorting to dark patterns and hiding controls, your business is no longer viable, sorry. Find a new model or make way for someone else that can.

You are entirely free to show adds and to charge money. The popups are only necessary if you additionally want to spy on users.

And by "spy on users" you mean "show ads that might at least remotely be relevant to the user"? The world is a lot bigger than the US. If there was no targeting of any kind then half of the ads you'd see would be in languages you can't even understand. Hell, that's the situation right now if you live in certain places in the world and this is with some tracking!

> If there was no targeting of any kind then half of the ads you'd see would be in languages you can't even understand.

Given I have zero interest in seeing ads in the first place, this sounds like a 'you' problem.

I'm not trying to be snarky here - this idea that relevant ads are important to users seems to be some sort of industry delusion. Why should I care if the people trying to sell me stuff while I read a news article are less able to target me? The ads are already an attention-demanding annoyance, it hardly matters what they're for.