[r0muald]

Because when you talk to a salesperson you know you're being looked at (and reciprocally you're looking at them), and human memory is limited so it's unlikely they will retain any "data" about you when the contact is finished.

Here, instead, there is no indication that you're being watched, analyzed and kept recorded for indefinite amounts of time.

[belorn]

Reminds of a law here in Sweden and how car surveillance work on the bridge to Denmark. The law forbids the unnecessary registration of people so in order to avoid breaking the law the police have a live system in place where information of a car on the danish side get show on a screen on the Swedish side, giving border and toll guards enough time to react. The whole thing is legal only because the system operate live and never store any data, which otherwise would create a illegal register with personal information.

[Angostura]

I assume that the data is being used for A/B testing on the display designs (we get 20% more attention from teenagers when the background is orange) - if that's the case, not very scummy.

[ludjer]

If you are in public you are being looked at I do not understand your logic. When you go in a public place there are already public accessible web cams that people use to track this kind of thing i remember a thesis that used public accessible cams to try and track people and build up a database. I have always had the opinion you lose privacy when you leave your house since you are in public, and public like is opposite of private/privacy so to me it makes sense.

[Silhouette]

I have always had the opinion you lose privacy when you leave your house

Privacy is not black and white.

There is a world of difference between someone seeing you for a moment as they pass you in the street and forgetting you a moment later, and automated systems that permanently record everything, analyse it, correlate it with other data sets, make it searchable, and ultimately make automated decisions or provide information that will be used by others to make judgements about the affected individuals, all without the knowledge or consent of those individuals and therefore without any sort of reciprocity.

The idea that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place dates from a time when you could also expect to pass through town in relative anonymity, go about your business without anyone but your neighbours and acquaintances being any the wiser, and would probably change those neighbours and acquaintances from time to time anyway so the only people who really knew much about you would be your chosen long-time friends and colleagues. I think it's safe to say that that boat sailed a while ago, and maybe what privacy means and how much of it we should expect or protect aren't the same in the 21st century.

[pyre]

Just because there is no expectation of privacy does not mean that a reasonable person would assume that their every action is being recorded in precise detail to be stored away forever by a third party.

[fixermark]

... but mostly because reasonable people haven't been brought up to speed on what is technologically feasible now.

[Silhouette]

A lot of things are technologically feasible, and in many cases can't realistically be prevented ahead of time, yet are still considered socially unacceptable or even made illegal. Just because we can do something, that doesn't mean we should. This principle has never been more relevant than in the use of technology.

[nathan_long]

What's technologically feasible is irrelevant to our moral expectations. It's technologically feasible to brain you with a club and steal your stuff, and has been for millennia.

Preventing the misuse of Blunt Instrument Technologies™ is literally what laws are for. Surveillance is just a club we don't have laws about yet, but should.