I don’t know how much money there is in tracking people and selling their online profiles / behavior patterns. My guess is that a huge amount of folly has people convinced that their folly is worth it. I hope that they are severely disappointed.
I first noticed with WordPress, that Automattic (the company behind WordPress), really wants to track your every move. They created the Gravatar system, and it is something that you cannot opt out of. You as a WordPress admin were not allowed local profile pictures – you had to use Automattic’s avatars or use nothing. And now it’s gotten worse. Your web site won’t run right without reporting in to the Automattic servers.
Every visit of yours to any WordPress site will generate a “hit” of you going to that web site. It’s worse than cookies, because at least you can delete your cookies.
What I’ve noticed is that if I have uBlock Origin turned on and “Block remote fonts” turned on, then WordPress does not render the admin panel correctly. Remote fonts are a way for the web site to get your machine to “phone home” to someone else’s servers. Apparently, Dahsicons have been a thing since WordPress 3.3.
Why should my web site make a call to Automattic’s servers just because you visited my web site? It does that with Gravatar (unless I try really hard to block that).
Other web sites appear broken when remote fonts are turned off.
I have a hard time believing that there is any good value to me for my web browser to retrieve on every page load an image file from a remote server just to show a button.