I just love it when I enter a store and someone who followed me go tell the seller all the shops I visited, what I shopped, for how long, what I searched and what I read
We have to stop this non-sense, and stop calling this « innovation »
We have to stop this non-sense, and stop calling this « innovation »
Profiling visitors based on their referrer to —quoting TFA— "show relevant content" is exactly this sort of creepy nonsense that leads to you (store owner) knowing where I do my research and being able to infer more about me than I've explicitly told you.
We're arguing slightly different things. Sure, guns don't kill people. Referrer as an aggregate statistic, on its own is pretty harmless. This script doesn't even phone home on its own.
But it's what you do with that data. How you collect it. What you collect with it. How you aggregate, or infer from it. Modern sales funnelling and marketing is all sold around targeting users. That's what this all feeds into.
Also, I don't think you can equate this with guns.
Try equating it with metal. Yes, you can make it into a gun, but you need to have lot of different things in place before you can use it to do harm.
Referrer data is completely anonymous. If you want to combine it into a profile, you need layers and layers of complexity and other data before you have something you can use it to target users based on their interests. With GDPR, this is illegal without consent anyway so I think you're overreacting.