Advertising is actively working against this - trying to find ways to correlate your activity across as many devices and accounts as possible. Especially now that work from home, BYOD and ZeroTrust (which reduces the need for corporate VPNs) are all blurring the lines and giving new opportunities for correlation.

> And if someone is likely to use an open source solution, they’re also unlikely to be influenced to switch to a paid product based on an ad instead.

This is assuming that the ad isn't promising something too good to be true, or using deceptive pricing to make it seem cheap enough to be better than the OSS, or using psychological tricks to try to override your rational choice (which may not work for this particular example, but may well work for many others).

> To be fair, you should use different profiles for your work and personal digital lives.

Isn’t that victim blaming?

I mean, I don’t like it either and I’d rather we didn’t have to take personal measures against this stuff.

But I still use a password manager to protect myself online. I also use different profiles to split my work and home digital lives.

Why should I have to use a different "profile"?

If you make the example abstract you might understand what the problem is.