> If you walk into a shop, you have an expectation to be observed (both to check you're not shoplifting, and also to see how customers behave). They don't tell you that you'll be observed, it's just one of those things you expect when you walk into someone's shop.

The problem is that this is a poor analogy to computer networking. I send you an HTTP request; you send me an HTTP response. I'm not visiting your shop; we're sending each other messages.

My expectation is that you won't follow me around, observing how long I look at certain parts of your message, gauging my reaction to different parts of your message. That this is the norm on the web is an unfortunate reality, but it doesn't make it okay.

Sorry, but we'll have to agree to disagree on this. Visiting amazon.com is exactly like walking into a shop, and nothing like "sending messages to a server".

I totally understand that that's what's happening behind the scenes, but that's like saying "I vibrated the air in specific harmonics" rather than "I said yes".

Taking your walking into a store analogy, what you are actually doing is taking an xray of every potential customer, going through their pockets, recording every receipt from their wallet and then uniquely tagging them with a barcode all in the very moment that they touch the door handle to enter. And that's assuming you are not trying to be evil.

Could you please disclose the name of your company so I can be sure to avoid it like the plague?

The extent to which visiting amazon.com is like walking into a shop is the extent to which Amazon puts up a facade to make it feel like that. That we're exchanging messages is not just what's happening behind the scenes, it's the essential truth of how communication happens on the net.

If I were visiting your shop, it's totally reasonable for you to check to make sure I'm not stealing anything. But I can't steal anything of yours by sending you messages! (Setting aside the possibility of me hacking your server, but that's not what you're sending me javascript to check on.) Hopefully this expresses more clearly why I don't think the shop analogy holds water.

If "sending messages" is too primitive of an abstraction, we can imagine exchanging letters in the mail, or buying a newspaper, or something like that.

(BTW, I'm sorry for the unconstructive sister comment here - I definitely don't condone it.)

Like a complicated privacy policy people won't read. (not your fault) The average person also doesn't understand the depths of what going into a shop now means. Walking into a shop they might expect they are on CCTV sure, but not that they are being tracked via wifi, customer counters, and whatever else retail establishments have come up now to datamine their customers without consent.

Maybe its time for shops to have EULA's covering the entire door before I open it.