[zamadatix]

Law isn't like software code. It doesn't have to be put to an exhaustive set of unit tests to 100% pass rate and then worry about anything it might not have covered. The law just needs to signal intent and scope clear enough the judicial system can work with interpreting it to new applications in a way most people can consider consistent.

In the case of cookies, they simply apply to computers and not people. Why? It's not about whether the two are operationally similar it's about whether the two are practically similar. Until every shopkeep meticulously tracks every detail of every customer interaction and starts efficiently sharing them with others, all manually, often enough and at a large enough scale that it becomes a similar privacy concern it's not really worth fretting the law be generic enough to cover the use cases. In such a case it probably even makes sense to just write a separate law which meets the domain's needs more succinctly.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Excellent post.

To hammer your point home even further, there's also the key point that in the digital world you also have entities like Meta that track you everywhere you go because they have their little tracker scripts running on almost every website.

To bring this back to the previous hypothetical, it's more like a single person following you around with a camera everywhere you go, which is already covered by existing laws.