More like strangers taking pictures of you without your consent (and often knowledge) with the intent to increase their profits and not sharing any of that with you.
Minority Personalized Advertising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ
If a stranger on the street started following me, taking pictures without permission, and taking notes about my appearance of actions and storing it in their database, I would say he was behaving unethically.
Ask street photographers - it's a delicate balance. Many people really dislike having their pictures taken without their permission.
ethical != opinion
Ethical has weight and you can lose your job, and even go to jail for being unethical. RMS actually has a very strong academic ethical mind (Even though I disagree with him more then agree). BUT ethics isn't easily defined.
Here is a decent link to defining Ethics. https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision...
Mind explaining where you think I implied otherwise? Or why you keep repeating this despite the fact that I haven't?
>Ethical has weight and you can lose your job, and even go to jail for [what your boss thinks is] unethical.
For example, doctors who get fired for performing abortions, something that most of hn doesn't find unethical.
>https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision...
That is itself, merely what Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer find ethical.
I mean, this is literally the "global village" coming to fruition. The online shopkeeper knows you just as well as a shopkeeper in a real village - it knows who you are, it remembers all your previous visits, it knows your hobbies (even if you didn't tell him about them, but someone else in the village), it can make suggestions based on that.
When you buy flowers, the village shopkeeper knows not only who's buying them, but also has a good idea for whom these flowers are intended. That's where we're heading.
This is the level of (non)privacy that we historically had, living in much smaller communities than modern cities. The trend of more anonymity brought by urbanization is reversing, but it's not something new or horrible, if anything, the possibility of being just another face in the crowd is an anomaly that existed for a (historically) short time and is slowly coming to an end once more.