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Comment by plusbryan | Hacker News Reader

Without wishing to belittle the privacy concerns of my fellow HNers, I wonder how long it will take for people to just be ok with being tracked in this way? This seems like one of those social changes that feels strange and uncomfortable at first, but over time becomes the accepted norm.

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It pains me if I see someone describing the slow and gradual installment of the total surveillance world and the loss of any privacy as just something "that feels strange and uncomfortable at first". I for one will never be okay with it! and I know a LOT of people that are against loosing civil liberties too (even if the likes of you don't care!).

Ofcourse I know that my smartphone broadcasts its mac/stored-essids every few seconds, thats why I have wifi disabled most of the time. Most people don't realize that, most people also don't realize the tracking capabilities of cookies. Laws in EU have begun to make it illegal to store cookies without the users consent, because even though its technically possible to block cookies, most people have no idea about that. So I can only hope that it will become one day illegal to violate peoples privacy like that!

People already have dozen of loyalty cards, and throw their email at every point of sale, which are handled in a centralized way behind the scene by a few actors.

Also, people log in with Facebook to basically anything.

"it's free" and "get cool rebates" create such an incredible variant of SEP field[0].

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEP_field#Fiction

Commercial Wifi routers already do retail traffic analysis.

https://meraki.cisco.com/blog/2013/12/get-a-visual-on-your-b...

So people are probably already being tracked... and no one has noticed.

There are multiple companies doing this at scale in the United States. It's a passive process. Good luck spotting it.

In the same way we are tracked with Cookies across the web, I don't see the difference.

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