Never said they were, only that they both using your browser & resources "against your own interests", and this is not a good argument against tracking.
When just displaying a static banner add, your browser is a lot more passive than implied by "agent that is acting" in the GPP. Simply displaying an image (with a little HTML for the link) and perhaps caching it in local storage is quite different from collecting & collating logs about you and distributing that back out to the where internet.
You are right about the bit of the post you noticed though, both do use at least some resources. This system more, but the simple banner still some.
