It implies that someone has built a profile describing your interests from your behaviour. Many people find that creepy, and not worth targeted advertising. It's reminiscent of secret police behaviour with their networks of informants, and is not a distant memory in much of Europe.

It's not much different than any other recommendation system though. It's also funny how these ads exist because they work - i.e. the user actually does find them interesting, clicks on them, and discovers a product they pay money for because it brings them value.

If you're certain I'll agree to being tracked as to receive a better advertising experience, simply ask first.

> It's reminiscent of secret police behaviour with their networks of informants

That's a bit of a stretch.

Also I don't believe the vast majority of people care about an organisation generating a profile of your interests, otherwise services like GMail and Facebook would have failed.

Right, I agree that this 'secret police' comparison is off.

But your Facebook/GMail comparison is different as well: They are not useful/popular because of user tracking, they provide us with a free and (limited..?) useful service. I'd argue that's a bad thing as well, but I'd separate multiple levels of evil tracking:

1) You track me to sell my data and to profit from the ads. I gain nothing (you might be very lucky to guess that I want X and therefor save me from having to type "Where to buy X" into Google, but I'd not consider that useful in general).

2) You provide a free service that I'd gladly use. You track information about me to make a living, pay the costs etc.

1) is unacceptable for me, although it tends to be largely ignored in general and considered normal.

2) is on the edge and I'd like you to at least tell me about your tracking and make me aware of the general data you're collecting. It's up to me to opt-in (by using the service and agreeing to this tracking) or going elsewhere.

> You track me to sell my data and to profit from the ads. I gain nothing

Sure you do; you get to use Gmail and Facebook for free because they generate enough money from ads not to have to charge.

I can understand that there people like yourself that don't want to be tracked, that's cool, but if the majority of people don't care, should the system at least be opt-out? Or left up to the user to use the do-not-track features of browsers?

I'm not saying tracking must be forced on everyone, but this piece of legislation seems like a massive hammer to hit a very tiny nail.

You didn't understand my post. Might be completely my fault though, so let me add one last remark:

I presented two tracking reasons/models. You quote my model 1), which is about user tracking for your own sake only, without giving something in return. In other words: There's no direct connection between you selling out what you collect about me and my usage.

You talk about GMail/Facebook, which I presented as another, different example/model, 2). The quote does not apply here.

For these services I trade privacy for usage and I merely wish that the trade would be more transparent so that everyone and his mom can decide if they want to give up these details for your service or not. But - it's at least a "deal" of some sort: You give me something valuable/useful, I have to cope with your privacy invasion.

Ah sorry I see your distinction, I misread model 2), thought you were referring to gmail/facebook in model 1).

Yeah if a company is tracking me which results in me gaining nothing and them gaining income, that is quite annoying, I'm not disagreeing that in that case it's wrong. But I still don't think you are harmed in a way that requires such a sweeping piece of legislation. These sorts of rules may land up harming the free services you refer to in model 2).

If there was a way to target just the companies in model 1) without interferring too much in the user experience of all web-users, I'd be for it.

Wait, what, what's wrong with optimizing the brainwashing techniques applied to myself?

Yeah, I do prefer seeing ads for stuff I don't need and would never buy than ads for stuff I don't need but it's vaguely possible I might be brainwashed into buying. If I think I need something and I want to browse ads for that something, I will just find a relevant catalogue/industry magazine/whatever.

See, if someone finds a security bug that allows to change something in our computer's software, we freak out and go for patches. If someone finds a bug in our brains, we call that "ads custom-tailored for your needs."

"My interests" are hard to define without collecting far too much information about me.

Good example for "of interest" in my opinion:

If I shop with Amazon and bought Product A, B and C and your database of previous orders suggests that I'd like to buy the new Album of Justin Bieber: Fine, go ahead and suggest that to me.

In that case you used just the information that I sent to you and correlated that with a little bit of inventory/anonymous order history magic. I get recommendations from you because I am your customer already and provided you with a limited insight into "my interests".

Now - if you track me across sites, try to create a profile of me without my consent and my explicit knowledge and then try to sell this as being relevant, a good idea and targeting "my interests" I have some doubts that we're talking about the same thing.

For me, informed consent is the issue here. If I sign up for your website and then log in, I think it's probably fair game to target things to them. In fact, that's generally the point.

My real world analogy is an invisible store employee following you around, helping you shop, but also writing down every movement you make, and every conversation you have.

It's more than a little creepy if they do it without asking.

You could also ask: What's wrong with news and political information geared towards your political opinions?

This comparison is not apt.

Simply denying aptitude is not an argument. Also, your initial comment only relies on reference to fringe advertising that (probably) nobody here would want to see.

Here are two arguments:

- news isn't targeted at a particular person (unless you're using your own RSS aggregator, but then you're not (usually) giving anyone else information about what you're aggregating).

- news is generally opt-in, meaning that I choose to read bbc instead of NYTimes

To clarify: My "what's wrong" question meant to show what's wrong with the "what's wrong" question I replied to.

So I agree with your two points. In fact you can easily use interest profiles for serving advertising and news alike, my comparison is apt.