There's a second side of this story, that nobody ever really talks about, because the cost is so diffuse. There are real, legit, uses for fingerprinting. One of the more common ones is anti-fraud for payments, as well as anti-abuse for social sites. I'm sure you've been to forums or other social sites where ban evading trolls, astroturfers, card checkers, and the like cause constant pain for both legitimate users and site operators. When I ran a large site with social interactions and payments/credits, I got deep insights into all the abusers who try to bilk the system for whatever they can. Because fingerprinting is so hard, bad users have an easy time to return with a zillion sock puppet accounts. As a normal user, my estimation is that I suffer more from the actions of those bad users who poison the well, than I would suffer from an internet that made everyone non-anonymous.