Following me around all over town like you did yesterday is considered stalking in my books.

Google isn't following you, they're just in every store you walk into no matter what.

Imagine almost every store in your city installed something facial recognition (a la Amazon Go). This system, given to owners literally for free, was created by one company - Google - and allowed them to automatically see what products most people were looking at, what time they were doing so, and their demographic. As payment, Google also gets this data and is able to use it for their means.

Note: i'm just making this analogy. Google Analytics (probably) isn't being used for ad targeting.

I was careful to say only that I saw you at the other store rather than implying I followed everywhere, since that's a fair line to draw and I wanted to avoid that particular connotation. But even still, hiring a private investigator is not illegal - it's just observational.

What you describe is not what actually happens.

What actually happens is that your behavior (in store or not) is permanently observed all the time and ads are served whether you want it or not.

Imagine if in all shops, always you'd get jumped on by attendant trying to sell you things. And sometimes shop attendant would appear out of the blue.

What you're describing you can have today - just convince user to make account in your shop and give you permission to send offers. You can chase him any time you want.

> Imagine if in all shops, always you'd get jumped on by attendant trying to sell you things. And sometimes shop attendant would appear out of the blue.

As opposed to the half of them where it currently happens?

50% better than on internet and they do not have my data.

> Maybe I watched you closely to learn exactly what you were thinking about buying.

If creepy shopkeepers following you round was a thing I suspect it would be illegal already.

That's the precipice of the argument though, right? It's not illegal to observe interactions that you witness, or take notes about customers you saw shopping your competition.

You could even hire someone to wander around your competing stores and take lots of notes about the people they saw. "Red shirt guy shopping around for slim fit pants". Unlikely scenario, but legal to do and to use that information.

My whole thing is - what makes the scenarios different enough that one is prohibited and one is allowed? Certainly if we told folks they must forget their observations about others upon request, that would face some baseline rebuttal about their own autonomy.

The difference is that one is an actual problem and the other isn't. That's it. There isn't some deep legal theory driving lawmaking.

It wasn't necessary to make this behavior illegal before because it was impractical, but now that computers have made mass surveillance practical, it should be illegal.