Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites

Kinda… but between credit cards (and any cards serviced by them—debit cards aren’t safe) and widespread facial recognition with cameras everywhere in stores these days, and things like “loyalty cards” being required to just get what should be normal prices on things, we’re pretty heavily tracked in physical space now, too. People just don’t realize how much, and don’t see this stuff being sold and aggregated then re-sold.

We really need to crack down on stalking-but-automated.

You came up with a good term there. Maybe we should start calling it “digital stalking” instead of just “tracking”

> widespread facial recognition with cameras everywhere in stores these days, and things like “loyalty cards” being required to just get what should be normal prices on things

Which is why this is also illegal in the same jurisdiction.

The big difference there is that unlike, say, Price Chopper, Google, Facebook, and Xitter can track not only what you do with them, but everything you do on thousands and thousands of sites across the internet, through analytics packages that send data back to them and/or the scripts loaded by their "social buttons".

If I buy baby food at Price Chopper, they might send me an email offering me discounts on diapers, but at least I (probably!) won't also get shown such ads literally everywhere I go on the web.

I’m pretty sure the loyalty-card thing has become so big because they’re selling the data.

So many things are like that now. Like Roku sticks and TVs are subsidized by selling user data. You want to make a Roku competitor that doesn’t spy? Your product will struggle to get on shelves and to stay there, in part because the price for your product will be higher even if you get just as good a price on your components as they do, because you’d have to price them at-cost to match Roku’s pricing. Meanwhile 99% of people looking at the products don’t realize that one’s cheaper than the other because it’s going to spy on them and sell the data.

> Meanwhile 99% of people looking at the products don’t realize that one’s cheaper than the other because it’s going to spy on them and sell the data.

And this, plus the fact that it's so abstract and opaque what the negative consequences of that spying are, is a huge part of the problem with all of it.

We need better regulations on this, but sadly, even before the recent fascist takeover, the regulators have been largely asleep at the wheel for decades.