[menacingly]

I enjoy the mental exercise of finding where boundaries lie.

For instance, if you simply observe the actions people take when they talk to you, that's obviously your observation. If you were to, say, journal it, it's still yours. It's a weird thing to do, but it's yours.

If you used the journal to optimize yourself, perhaps to make conversation with you more enjoyable, again, that's weird, but perhaps also merely a paper version of what already goes on inside your head.

What if talking to you were really enjoyable, so that while people could technically avoid it, they usually didn't want to?

At what magnitude does the volume of people you're observing reach a scale where the people you're observing start to believe your observations are theirs?

[detaro]

two parts: purpose (e.g. GDPR excludes household activity, which a private journal of "everyone I talk to" would be if it's only for private use) and structure (with at least for GDPR a neatly kept notebook/ledger possibly already being organized enough to qualify). Although the observations are not "theirs" as in "their property", they merely gain rights against you to obtain information about them and copies, and rights to control your usage.

[tjoff]

It's a huge difference when a company does it rather than an individual (as in your example).

[menacingly]

It's a convenient difference, but I don't think it actually impacts anything.

It's an indirect way to address the level of resources you have at your disposal, which is itself only important for the scale at which you can capture the data.

In general, for the things people are OK with citizens doing but not OK with corporations doing, they mean an individual could not do it at a scale that bothers them. I'm specifically curious about what that scale is.

Certainly for me, there exists a hypothetical scale at which an individual gathering and recording detailed observations of other people becomes a little unsettling. Perhaps not criminal, but it falls into a "wish it didn't happen" bucket.