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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a category error here around 'choice'.

Who is choosing? I can walk into a store and look around without making a commitment to buy a product. I may leave realizing that there is nothing for me here. I chose not to become a customer. Or I chose to be a customer and there was a ritual exchanging of gifts and information which is relatively clear to all parties.

Websites don't work that way. I can't 'browse' without them already tracking me. I haven't agreed to anything yet. The transition happens without my awareness. It's predatory.

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You may be (un)pleasantly surprised by the amount of physical/real-world tracking of in-store traffic that stores are engaging in now. In many physical stores, you don't really have the option of "'browsing' without them already tracking me" either. Worse yet, there's not even a pretense of viewing/accept some Terms and Conditions when you physically enter the store (at least websites pay the lip service of having a T&C posted or a cookie consent pop-up).

One random example from 2018 (so, probably a lot more advanced and widespread by now): https://www.adweek.com/digital/adobes-newest-labs-project-ca...

I would characterize this as "the situation has been bad for so long in the online world that it has now metastasized into the physical world".

Could be I'm wrong about that, but how long do you have to embolden people before they do something truly brazen?

They have been engaged in that sort of marketing and tracking at least back when computers were big iron only - although to a lesser degree by watching customers and tweaking stores accordingly. Milk is in the back of the grocery store? Not because of insulation or anything like that but because people often pop into the grocery store for it and "running the gauntlet" results in them picking up more items than their initial goal. Not entirely comparable in capabilities of course.

Sure, which is precisely why my point is that the solution here is transparency, not giving people money. If people are educated about what information they're providing and what it's being used for, then they do have that choice.

Imagine you had a screen like you do when you connect two integrated services that tells you exactly what data is being sent (e.g. if you authorize this mobile game to access your Facebook account, it will be able to access your profile picture, friends list, etc.) before you access a site. If that happens, you know that the site is going to collect your location data, browsing history, etc., and you know that they are going to use it to both serve you ads and will sell it to third parties. From there, you can make a decision as to whether that use of your data is worth access to the site, and the market will eventually decide what value people place on their data.

The difference is that a store doesn't spend significant amount of their resource on you when you just look around, but most of websites do.

Suggesting that sites do not have right to retain information about what you asked them to do after you've read an article or created an account, would be similar to saying that bookstore should allow you to read entire books standing in the store, or that they can't use their security cameras because you may be visible on them.

not only are physical stores tracking you, but i still remember the documentary about the perfume that is spread out across the store to make you buy more.

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