I think it depends a lot on how you frame it, and analogies work much less well than people expect because of ways the Internet is very different from previous environments.
The intuitive social norms surrounding the store clerk involve the clerk having socially normal memory performance and a social conscience surrounding how they use that memory. What if the store clerk were writing down everything you did in the store, including every time you picked your nose, your exact walking path, every single item you looked at and put back, and what you were muttering to your shopping companion? What if that list were quickly sent off to an office across the country, where they would try to figure out any number of things like “which people look suspicious” and “where to display which items”? What if the clerk followed you around the entire store with their notepad when it’s a giant box store with many departments? For the cross-site case, imagine that the office also receives detailed notes about you from the clerks at just about every other place you go, because those ones wound up with more profitable store layouts and lower theft rates and the other shops gradually went out of business.
There are other analogy framings still; consider one with security cameras instead, and whether it feels different, and what different assumptions might be in play. But in all of those cases, relying on misplaced assumptions about humanlike capability, motivation, and agency is to be wary of. (Fortunately, I think a lot of people here should be familiar with that one!)
Yeah, I share the sense that simply reasoning from analogy is not super useful here, which is why I disagreed a bit with the top-level argument which said that by analogy to existing marketing practices, we should consider tracking obviously equivalent to stalking, which felt relatively weak to me (though I do actually think there are a bunch of quite serious problems with trackers of various forms).
I think it depends a lot on how you frame it, and analogies work much less well than people expect because of ways the Internet is very different from previous environments.
The intuitive social norms surrounding the store clerk involve the clerk having socially normal memory performance and a social conscience surrounding how they use that memory. What if the store clerk were writing down everything you did in the store, including every time you picked your nose, your exact walking path, every single item you looked at and put back, and what you were muttering to your shopping companion? What if that list were quickly sent off to an office across the country, where they would try to figure out any number of things like “which people look suspicious” and “where to display which items”? What if the clerk followed you around the entire store with their notepad when it’s a giant box store with many departments? For the cross-site case, imagine that the office also receives detailed notes about you from the clerks at just about every other place you go, because those ones wound up with more profitable store layouts and lower theft rates and the other shops gradually went out of business.
There are other analogy framings still; consider one with security cameras instead, and whether it feels different, and what different assumptions might be in play. But in all of those cases, relying on misplaced assumptions about humanlike capability, motivation, and agency is to be wary of. (Fortunately, I think a lot of people here should be familiar with that one!)
Yeah, I share the sense that simply reasoning from analogy is not super useful here, which is why I disagreed a bit with the top-level argument which said that by analogy to existing marketing practices, we should consider tracking obviously equivalent to stalking, which felt relatively weak to me (though I do actually think there are a bunch of quite serious problems with trackers of various forms).