[deadbytes]

Tracking is not ethical. Corporations only get away with it because most users don't realise it's even happening.

If you went into a retail store and an employee followed you around the whole time with a notebook and stopwatch writing down everywhere you walked and every product you looked at, you would rightly be creeped the fuck out and tell him to stop.

This is exactly what online tracking is, but done virtually.

[sbarre]

> If you went into a retail store and an employee followed you around the whole time with a notebook and stopwatch writing down everywhere you walked and every product you looked at

I hate to break it to you, but retail companies are doing this today using security camera footage, to figure out what parts of the store customers start at, or spend the most time in..

[prirun]

They're also doing it with Bluetooth beacons / pings, explaining why every store has an app they want you to install:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet...

[PeterisP]

This is one of key applications of GDPR in Europe - the fact that you can collect data for one purpose (e.g. security cameras) does not necessarily imply that you're permitted to use the same data for any other purpose (e.g. marketing analysis of customer movements).

For the former purpose, it would generally be sufficient to inform visitors with a sign on the entrance with legitimate interest clause; for the latter example IMHO the only practical compliant solution would require anonymization of the data, so you could make and store density data iff you don't have any way to tie them back to customer identities including the purchases they made, which is a key difference from the facebook example, which (as far as I understand) uses unique IDs to link the conversions to specific FB accounts.

[charcircuit]

The difference is that with a human near by I feel like I am being judged and when they are not I do not feel that kind of pressure. The grocery store I've gone to my whole life has always had security cameras tracking people for reasons I assume to deal with theft. It does not effect me at all and the store has useful data that they can use. It benefits all parties.

[deadbytes]

>The difference is that with a human near by I feel like I am being judged and when they are not I do not feel that kind of pressure

I will offer you another perspective to consider.

Technology is extremely subversive in that it bypasses all of our brain's instinctual responses. Someone or something monitoring and tracking you should be setting off warning sirens in your brain. At best they are trying to study you, at worse they are trying to exploit or harm you.

Through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution our brains have built up warning systems to make us feel fear and unease when we realise we are being tracked. But since humans have spent 99.99% of evolution entirely in the physical world these systems have no concept of the digital.

The reason you feel extremely uneasy when being monitored by a person, but not when being monitored by a computer system that is collecting the exact same information (or more), is that your subconscious brain doesn't understand computers.

[charcircuit]

>our brains have built up warning systems to make us feel fear and unease when we realise we are being tracked

>The reason you feel extremely uneasy when being monitored by a person

I don't though. If someone walked up to me and asked me what my favorite color was and they wrote it down I don't feel any negative feeling.

Even if it was a true thing just because we have a warning system that doesn't mean that something is actually bad. Tracking just gives people more information to allow for better decisions to be made and it can make things more efficient.