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Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

1) You data has value and it belongs to you. If it is taken with out permission, that is stealing. Bad thing.

2) Taking one cent from your back account every day wont make your day to day life worse. Day to day being worse is not a standard that is useful.

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1) I don't agree with this. If I walk into (or around) a Best Buy and they capture my movement on a security camera, are they stealing from me? Technically, they are recording data of my movement. Also, stealing generally infers that the victim is left without the stolen item. That's why we don't call piracy stealing. So, if anything, trackers are 'pirating' my browsing information and possibly reselling it. Truthfully, I wasn't doing anything with that information before, so my life hasn't changed for better or worse because of this. No proof of bad thing here.

2) It is a useful standard. I avoid being nit-picky about the little things, and so I like to make a distinction between things that are worth worrying about. If ~$273 is taken from my bank account over my entire lifetime (based on average lifetime), I'm really not going to worry about it. If data tracking is on the same side of the distinction as taking 1 cent from my bank account, I'm fine with that.

1) we'll take another example, let's say you have your own religious views and those get collected in a database, seemingly no harm done here. Then comes a newly elected government with different religious views who decides people holding the same religious views as yours should wear a distinctive sign to warn the public, then to gather those people in camps, then starts mass killing those people on an industrial scale. This happened before, if it were to happen again in the future you would have no way of hiding facts about you as everything has been collected about you for years.

Wow....you just took web analytics and tracking and somehow morphed it into the holocaust. That's probably the biggest slippery slope argument I've ever seen in my life.

This is obviously an extreme example, but it's valid nonetheless. nazi germany had to build the database (thanks IBM) they needed, a future nazi, fascists or the like government wouldn't have to, those databases already exists in much more details nazi germany would have dreamed of (facebook seems to know you're gay before you do or your family does [1]).

But this nazi example is one everybody can relate to because we're all familiar with it. But if this is too strong we could go a bit further in history and talked about richelieu "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." and the current state of us law [2].

[1]: http://americablog.com/2013/03/facebook-might-know-youre-gay... [2]: http://www.harveysilverglate.com/Books/ThreeFeloniesaDay.asp...

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