> why is it considered perfectly acceptable for them to track you to such a relentless degree? Throwing around "tracking" as a dirty word made sense when the I

> why is it considered perfectly acceptable for them to track you to such a relentless degree? Throwing around "tracking" as a dirty word made sense when the Internet was a brochure. Paper doesn't normally remember that you looked at it, and HTTP pretended to be a way of looking at a piece of paper, instead of what it is, an interaction. Tracking is integral to all interactions. Taking sensory data from two different points in time, and deciding that both are representations of this thing called a person that's standing over there, and that said person comes with all these characteristics that are fixed, and all these characteristics that are mutable over time, and that I have all these previous experiences with that person, and a mental model of how they might react to certain things, and a mental model of their hidden internal state like mood or sleepiness, that is the essence of tracking. Friendship is sort of its ultimate form, so it makes sense that an electronic medium for friendship is the heaviest "tracker" on the internet. We humans can absolutely consent to and facilitate tracking that we want, or else we wouldn't associate with each other. Google's suite of services and the tracking it performs make it more useful to me. When I search for an English word that has a special meaning in programming, it knows I mean it in the software engineering sense. When I open Google Maps I can tap two keys instead of 20 to get directions home. I have the agency to accept that. The privacy issues of the modern world, to me, have little to do with tracking: rather, they are a violation of expectations, of confidence. You might think, when you send a "private" message on Facebook, that it will only be read by the named recipient. But it may just as well be read by an anonymous NSA analyst. That's where the evil lies. Or, you may think, when you're on a site other than Facebook, that Facebook has no idea you're there. But the "Like" button is watching you, associating that visit with your Facebook profile. That's what's fucked up.