4 ms·

It would be very difficult to make this a crime, because a lot of customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them. What they don't want is fo

It would be very difficult to make this a crime, because a lot of customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them. What they don't want is for their information to then be sold and passed around willy-nilly.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them Customers want free shit. American culture remains prickly to being tracked.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  Right, the "free shit" part is when they profit from the data behind your back. THAT is the part that should be illegal. But it should be a perfectly valid business model for me to pay someone to (for example) watch everything I do and everything my body does, and give me personalized health advice, as long as they keep my data under lock and key for only my and their proprietary analysis algorithm's "eyes" to ever see. It's not the "tracking all your info" that is bad, it's that they legitimately believe that it's their info to do with as they please.
- handrous 5y ago
  Notably, it's not even clear how much less "free shit" we'd get without spying-funded "free" services ruling the Web landscape. Those services don't just compete with paid alternatives, they compete with actually free. I think it's likely open protocols and open source software would see a surge of interests from users and developers working on them if they didn't have hundreds-of-developers paid teams with advertising budgets competing with them and giving their work away "for free" (with spying). Now, I hesitate to guess how much this factor would make up for the loss, but the amount of free shit we'd lose by outlawing spying-based advertising is surely less, by some amount, than 100% of what it currently funds.
ratww 5y ago
Then just ask customers if they want or not, like Apple is forcing FB to do. The ones who want to be tracked will just say yes.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them Customers want free shit. American culture remains prickly to being tracked.

teawrecks 5y ago
Right, the "free shit" part is when they profit from the data behind your back. THAT is the part that should be illegal. But it should be a perfectly valid business model for me to pay someone to (for example) watch everything I do and everything my body does, and give me personalized health advice, as long as they keep my data under lock and key for only my and their proprietary analysis algorithm's "eyes" to ever see. It's not the "tracking all your info" that is bad, it's that they legitimately believe that it's their info to do with as they please.
handrous 5y ago
Notably, it's not even clear how much less "free shit" we'd get without spying-funded "free" services ruling the Web landscape. Those services don't just compete with paid alternatives, they compete with actually free. I think it's likely open protocols and open source software would see a surge of interests from users and developers working on them if they didn't have hundreds-of-developers paid teams with advertising budgets competing with them and giving their work away "for free" (with spying). Now, I hesitate to guess how much this factor would make up for the loss, but the amount of free shit we'd lose by outlawing spying-based advertising is surely less, by some amount, than 100% of what it currently funds.

ratww 5y ago

Then just ask customers if they want or not, like Apple is forcing FB to do. The ones who want to be tracked will just say yes.