At the risk of sounding like a broken record, monetisation and indiscriminate collection of user data should be illegal.
The need for consent would come if the assistant were to record the entire conversion you have with the customer, and send it to Facebook or Amazon in exchange for money.
You haven't read enough dystopic fiction.
Or the civil rights movement?
Or the labor movements?
But the main point with my comment was to re-frame what was advocated, from their fantasy of "one small store owner doing the best for their customers" into "a surveillance system where every corporation tracks your every move for profit".
Only that's not where it stops.
After the customer leaves the store one of you minions follows him to every other store he ever enters to record what he buys, or even looks at
That's why your analogy falls completely flat.
Nobody would complain if it only concerns your store and your sales. But people violently dislike you snooping on everything that your customer does.
Worse! He doesn't even have to be a customer of yours. You snoop anyway, even into his most private affairs.
Worse! You also share this information with credit bureaus, meaning the data is available to potential employers. Thus limiting your job options.
Looked at a hookah once because you were curious? Sorry, no pot-heads in my company!
In my store analogy, I’m trying to make discourse on this topic less black and white. To recognize that data collection is not some inherent evil. And sure, to point out that a store that tries to peep in your bedroom window should be called to task.
Those industries have essentially built a worldwide spying system that would make the NSA jealous without them even having to pay a dime and capitalism guarantees those systems will keep being maintained forever.
That's not really the argument your opponent has.
It's that pervasive data collection, even if it's 'only' outside your house, is quite bad.
> I’m trying to make discourse on this topic less black and white.
Then you need to rethink your framing, because right now you're trying to split it into "store tracks transactions by itself and uses that data itself" and "tries to peep in your bedroom window".
Everyone else is talking about shades of gray too. But they're pointing out that 90% of the store-tracking shades have significant negative consequences.