Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyrhho | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com