Yeah, I guess I do feel entitled not to have my browsing habits tracked, dissected, and correlated by actors with demonstrably unclean hands.

Guilty as charged.

Yes, but there's still nothing preventing someone from DVRing a TV show and then manually fast forwarding through the commercials. I'm sure advertisers would love to put a stop to that too, but it really can't be done unless you go to extreme measures to remove control from the end user and trample over the legitimate use cases.

If advertisers do find some way to prevent "active" ad blocking, the next step will be to download an entire page, ads and all, and then strip out the useless bits. This would even have the side effect of inflating download counts in comparison to actual views.