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Comment by OrganicMSG | Hacker News Reader

>If tracking the activity of an app's users would amount to spying, then I guess entire fleet of third-party SaaS services would need to go

If you were to explain this current behaviour to people from around 25 years or so ago, the vast majority of them would view what is these days euphemistically described as analytics, as definitely being a form of spying. The fact that it has been turned into a large commercial industry does not change what the behaviour actually is. That the NKVD was a routine part of Soviet society didn't excuse them and the same reasoning will not excuse modern marketing culture either.

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But people from around 25 years ago (and to this day) have always been accustomed to this "form of spying". If you walk into a store you are typically followed around by the store staff who are always there to help you in case you aren't able to find something you are looking for. Technically this is a "form of spying". But we do not protest. We instead label it "hospitality". Once you become a "returning visitor" to the store, the store staff get to know you really well and treat you like a VVIP. This is nothing but analytics in the real world. It just so happens that the information collected about you isn't as structured as the virtual world.

I guess by conflating multiple terminologies into one basket we are probably doing ourselves a bit of disservice.

>If you walk into a store you are typically followed around by the store staff who are always there to help you in case you aren't able to find something you are looking for. Technically this is a "form of spying". But we do not protest.

Two things. Firstly, it is an entirely fatuous argument to try and claim that overly attentive shop assistants are somewhere in the same ballpark as modern digital analytics. They are not even playing the same sport.

Secondly, please do not consider getting a job as a shop assistant here in the UK, as overly attentive shop assistants are one of the few things that we actually do protest bitterly about, almost to the same degree as inaccurate weather reports, or people not properly understanding queuing.

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