Noticing and remembering people's faces, clothes, tics, etc. when they walk up to you and interact is not stalking.

That is a fair point, for sure. But I don't think it's the whole story.

What about this: Noticing and remembering people's faces, clothes, tics, etc. when they walk up to you. Also you have blanketed the planet in cameras that all feed back to a giant database that builds a detailed dossier on almost everyone, based on faces, clothes, tics, etc.

The way you put it sounds almost accidental, like no effort was made, with no real goal in mind. That's not a faithful analogy of the pervasiveness of Google Analytics, Facebook buttons, etc.

Stalking is toward another person, that person is specific and it's voluntarily towards that person.

> Noticing and remembering people's faces, clothes, tics, etc. when they walk up to you and interact is not stalking.

It is when you place yourself in a position to be nearly every one of the hundreds of people that person interacts with in a day.

Quantity has a quality all of its own. You can't property reason about tracking and surveillance through analogies to conventional social interaction.

Noticing in itself isn't but we're talking about amassing surveillance intel on people, bundling into packages and selling to the highest bidder. Or selling to hackers on black market. Normally you'd need a private detective licence and a good reason for each tracked person.

human memory isn't comparable to digital memory. When we recall a person's face we've interacted with we don't beam that information telepathically to others and we (most of us) gradually forget the face over time.

Well, there is something called cyberstalking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstalking

I don’t think you will be able to convince a court that browser fingerprinting is cyberstalking though, but you could certainly try.

Cynical mode: The law suit would be very expensive, but imho. possible to get to the next round. This elevates for several instances, until you're out of money and the lawyers can burry it.

And, if it came to a lawsuit, you'd be up against Amazon, Facebook and Google all at once (among others).

You can choose your battles. There's no need or obligation to take on all targets, and the legal strategy of first pursuing a tractable, or even sympathetic (to your interests) target is well established.

The cyberstalking industry has many players. Most are small. A target-rich environment.

Shifting the investment or financing calculus, via increased investor risk, possibly including legal liability, would be huge.

So we need an organization like EFF for that.

This is really more like sousveillance[0]. I'm not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, recording server logs has been standard and accepted practice pretty much since there were web servers. On the other hand, we have the capability to record and discern so much more information now and to do more with that information once we've recorded it.

Ultimately, I think it should require user consent. (And, speaking of consent, I wonder if simple fingerprinting and associating a browser with an ID would violate the GDPR. It's clearly intended to be "personal" to one particular user, but is it "identifiable" information? Does it matter?)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance