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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

This isn't surprising, people don't want to be stalked online anymore than they want to be stalked in the real world. If sites are worried about having to bring up a big dialog saying "please let us track you and everything that you do" hurting their site traffic perhaps they should just give up on tracking users.

If 90% say no to a dialog there probably isn't much point in asking, and asking probably turns people away from your site. The only reason that this kind of stalking didn't turn people away in the past is because it was hidden from them.

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Reminds me of what happened with cable companies and "negative optioning" up here in Canada.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_option_billing

When Parliament went to ban the practice, the cable monopolies had the giant brass balls to complain that if they actually had to ask consumers if they wanted to spend money on new channels, the consumers would say "no," which would hurt the television industry. Whereas if they could just start charging money and force consumers to pick up the phone and cancel the service, well, people wouldn't do that.

Appalling, and it seems to be the same mentality at work.

Your analogy to real-world "stalking" breaks down a bit. For one, real stores do record customers. It's called security cameras. If you're in someone's store you should assume that they have video of you there. Why should that be any different on the internet? If you visit my "store" I should be free to record that.

Secondly, and more importantly, you make it seem like the user is merely an innocent victim, however the user is choosing to use a browser which accepts and explicitly sends cookies with every request. If they don't like that they are free to turn off cookies in their browser, or use a browser which doesn't accept cookies.

edit: fixing typo

> If you're in someone's store you should assume that they have video of you there. Why should that be any different on the internet? If you visit my "store" I should be free to record that.

The ethics of that position break down if you're offering an essential service and everyone takes the same view: now people have no choice but to be recorded, even though on privacy grounds that isn't necessarily a good thing.

The solution to that problem is to legislate that people's personal privacy outweighs a business's desire to track them, and while the specific rules we're talking about here are perhaps not ideal, I think going in that direction is going to become more and more important in the next few years as automated data mining technology can be used to profile ever more details about ever more people.

Your analogy to an online store breaks down as well ... you have a users IP address, and what part they accessed, thus you have logged this user.

What supermarkets don't do and what cookies do allow now is for you to track said user over multiple visits. If I go to a supermarket and buy food and pay with cash, they don't have a record of me having come in three days ago to purchase the exact same items. With a cookie that is set for 12 years in the future you will know it is me visiting again, and again, and again.

Devil's advocate here. What about all the content producers and services that rely on advertisements for the bulk of their income? I'm afraid the result of this law will be a drop in online advertising, or at least a drastically lower price due to less demographic information about visitors. Less advertising money means more incentive for content producers and service providers to charge users directly, instead of charging advertisers. As much as I value my privacy, I don't want the rest of the web to follow the example set by The New York Times. I realize we'll have to see how things play out, but I don't think my fears are baseless, and I certainly don't think a law is the answer to this problem.

It would be nice to think that this will lead to a workable micropayments system. Relying on ad funding has never been a sustainable business model (edit: for the kinds of site you're talking about) if only because ad blockers will eventually kill it.

Rather than trying to prop up a dying business model, we need to develop new ones that do cater to the needs of both consumers and providers. I suggest we try the radical "we make something you find useful, and you pay us a fair price for it" model that I hear was used by a couple of bricks 'n' mortars places with some success. :-)

Edit: I would gladly pay a small flat fee for, say, a month of access to the BBC's web site, provided that this could be done with trivial effort and with decent tools to track my total spend and some sort of simple refund/guarantee policy that works for any site using the system. If that also means I can throw a bone to other sites I value to help with their running costs, I don't have a problem with that either.

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