[akersten]

Why should it be illegal for me to recognize the way you walk into my store, even though you're wearing a mask and a trenchcoat? Some vague sense of indignation?

Yeah, tracking bad, I get it, but are whatever damages that kind of legislation would prevent (probably nothing measurable) really more important than fixing the easy, in our face social problems that politicians could instead be focusing on?

[thepasch]

> Why should it be illegal for me to recognize the way you walk into my store

If you did it in just your store, that wouldn't be a problem. The correct analogy, however, is "why should it be illegal for me to attach a perfectly traceable and invisible air-tag to you when you enter my store, without your explicit consent, and subsequently follow and document your every movement no matter where you go, as long as that location has a business relationship with my store, and also my store is the most popular chain on the planet that has business relationships with basically any relevant business that exists." And I don't think the answer to this one shouldn't be particularly difficult to arrive at.

[akersten]

Well it's not really an airtag, I don't "attach" anything to your browser when I check what its GPU can do.

That's just a description of you that I share with my other stores. Casinos, Target, Burger King, etc all do this when you get 86'd, for example.

[chjj]

The analogy falls apart when "your store" is actually a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations that surveil a significant portion of the internet and covertly grant government agencies (and god knows who else) access to the data.

It's passive surveillance on the order of billions of people. It's not a mom-and-pop shop.

[amelius]

Yes, and we need a name for the fallacy of GP. It's a recurring theme.

[lorecore]

> Why should it be illegal for me to recognize the way you walk into my store, even though you're wearing a mask and a trenchcoat?

If you have that right, the public should have the right to know you're doing this before they enter your store, so they can avoid it.

Same with the websites, they should, legally, have to say they're about to fingerprint you so that you can close your browser tab and never come back.

[simondotau]

There's nothing wrong with websites choosing to comply with particular privacy standards. This should be voluntary and used as a trust signal. A website that promises to follow certain standards should be legally accountable if it breaks that promise, but it should not be mandatory to make such promises.

[kaladin-jasnah]

Isn't fingerprinting used across many different websites? Then the analogy would be a number of stores colluding to recognize the same person across all stores?

(I have no idea, I don't know too much about this)

[charcircuit]

Which is famously done by casinos. But in practice many businesses big and small do share intelligence with each other about problematic customers who shoplift etc.

[altcognito]

Because you don't have a right to know everything about me, follow me to my home, my purchasing preferences, and so on and so forth.

[simondotau]

Holy slippery slope, Batman. Just because you don't have a right to know everything about you, follow you home, and see what you bought elsewhere, doesn't mean I'm not allowed to observe how your [thing claiming to be a browser] behaves when it connects to my website.

If you want to make it harder to guess whether you're human or a malicious bot, you're going to find yourself clicking on more than just traffic lights and bicycles in the near future.