Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know how I feel about this overall. I think we took some rules from the physical world that we liked and discarded others that we've ended up with a cognitively dissonant space.

For example, if you walked into my coffee shop, I would be able to lay eyes on you and count your visits for the week. I could also observe were you sit and how long you stay. If I were to better serve you with these data points, by reserving your table before you arrive with your order ready, you'd probably welcome my attention to detail. However, if I were to see you pulled about x number of watts a month from my outlets, then locked up the outlets for a fee suddenly - then you'd rightfully wish to never be observed again.

So what I'm getting at is, the issues with tracking appear to be with the perverse assholes vs. the benevolent shopkeeps of the tracking.

To wrap up this thought: what's happening now though is a stalker is following us into every store, watching our every move. In physical space, we'd have this person arrested and assigned a restraining order with severe consequences. However, instead of holding those creeps accountable, we've punished the small businesses that just want to serve us.

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I don't know how I feel about this or really what to do.

The coffee shop analogy falls apart after a few seconds because tracking in real life does not scale the same way that tracking in the digital space scales. If you wanted to track movements in a coffee shop as detailed as you can on websites or applications with heavy tracking, you would need to have a dozen people with clipboards strewn about the place, at which point it would feel justifiably dystopian. The only difference on a website is that the clipboard-bearing surveillers are not as readily apparent.

> you would need to have a dozen people with clipboards strewn about the place

Assuming you live in the US, next time you're in a grocery store, count how many cameras you can spot. Then consider: these cameras could possibly have facial recognition software; these cameras could possibly have object recognition software; these cameras could possibly have software that tracks eye movements to see where people are looking.

Then wonder: do they have cameras in the parking lot? Maybe those cameras can read license plates to know which vehicles are coming and going. Any time I see any sort of news about information that can be retrieved from a photo, I assume that it will be done by many cameras at >1 Hertz in a handful of years.

I'm in Germany, so even if those places have cameras, they need to post a privacy notice describing what they do and how long they retain data. Sure, most people will not read this, but it's out there. I will make a mental note to read these privacy notices more often from now.

I think that's the point. It's the level of detail of tracking online that's the problem. If a website just wants to know someone showed up, that's one thing. If a site wants to know that I specifically showed up, and dig in to find out who I specifically am, and what I'm into so they can target me... that's too much.

Current website tracking is like the coffee shop owner hiring a private investigate to dig into the personal lives of everyone who walks in the door so they can suggest the right coffee and custom cup without having to ask. They could not do that and just let someone pick their own cup... or give them a generic one. I'd like that better. If clipboards in coffee shops are dystopian, so is current web tracking, and we should feel the same about it.

I think Bear strikes a good balance. It lets authors know someone is reading, but it's not keeping profiles on users to target them with manipulative advertising or some kind of curated reading list.

I don't think it's very important that people "can" do this; the only thing that matters if they actually "are" doing it.

The coffe shop reserving my place and having my order ready before I arrive sounds nice - but is it not an innecessary luxury, that I would not miss had I never even thought of its possibility? I never asked for it, I was ready to stand in line for my order, and the tracking of my behavior resulted in a pleasant surprise, not a feature I was hoping for. If I really wanted my order to be ready when I arrive, then I would provide the information to you, not expect that you observe me to figute it out.

My point is that I don't get why the small businesses should have the right to track me to offer me better services that I never even asked for. Sure, its nice, but its not worth deregulating tracking and allowing all the evil corps to track me too.

Here's a better analogy using the coffee shop:

You walk into your favorite coffee shop, order your favorite coffee, every day. But because of privacy reasons the coffeeshop owner is unaware of anything. Doesn't even track inventory, just orders whatever whenever.

One day you walk in and now you can't get your favorite coffee... Because the owner decided to remove that item from the menu. You get mad, "Where's my favorite coffee?" the barista says "owner removed it from menu" and you get even more upset "Why? Don't you know I come in here every day and order the same thing?!"

Nope, because you don't want any amount of tracking whatesoever, knowing any type of habits from visitors is wrong!

But in this scenario you deem the owner knowing that you order that coffee every day ensures that it never leaves the menu, so you actually do like tracking.

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