[smeyer]

I'm attracting a lot of downvotes, and I feel like people think I'm supporting Verizon. I agree with you in that I think they're being scummy, but I guess I was just saying that when you ask "How can they discriminate like that?" the answer is that lots of scummy things aren't illegal. I agree it might be nice to see much stronger privacy laws in this area, but they don't exist yet and that's most of what I was trying to say. I think I thought you were saying that you thought it was illegal ("isn't there a law...") whereas you were really just saying you thought it should be illegal.

[ewzimm]

I do think it should be illegal, but "isn't it illegal?" was a genuine question. I don't know the specifics, but I'm surprised there isn't some legal requirement. You can't even send e-mail without allowing an opt-out, and every ad network I know of has an opt-out policy, so sending tracking information to every website you visit and selling that information with no option to opt-out just seems over the top and out of step with what everyone else offers.