That's a good analogy, but it illustrates the problem. Just because you don't like something, does not by itself make it antisocial.

If someone at your kid's school told you that the teacher repeatedly made them do homework, would that be bullying? Of course not. Just because some people don't like targeted ads does not make it antisocial. You just don't like it, which is fine. Don't read the email.

Yes. Ads good, privacy bad. Keep working at Google.

By the way, I may or may not have placed a bunch of hidden cameras in your house. What's that, antisocial? No, no. I swear it's going to be convenient for you. You may get a disturbing email from a company I sell the footage to at some point, by the way. Just don't read that email, ok?

This one is pretty easy though. Forget the camera, we have a pervasive norm that you can't be in my house without my permission. With or without cameras, you've violated the norm, and in this case also the law.

I'm not arguing that all data collection is ok. I'm just arguing against the point that all data collection is not ok.

> we have a pervasive norm that you can't be in my house without my permission. With or without cameras, you've violated the norm

Well, I also do my Internet browsing from home. What are you doing in my house with your ads and trackers?

Adtech industry is stepping on quite a lot of norms indeed. Not surveilling people in their homes is one that's commonly violated. That a HTTP user agent is free to interpret and present the response from a HTTP server in any way it (and the user) sees fit is another, this one frequently fretted about, and users are being bullied over it.

(Another one would be consent - this one got enshrined into law in the EU. It annoys adtech people so much that they deploy every possible psychological manipulation trick to deprive users of their agency without crossing the legal line - and quite often with blatantly illegal practices. When confronted, they try to shift the blame for their techniques to regulators who are "forcing" them.)

If you approach norms purely from a "what does the law say about X" perspective, sure. But laws can change, and before we wrote it down in a book with legal constructs, a lot of people were not OK with the concept of "murder", "theft", etc. I think that from the comments here, you'll learn that a lot of people are not OK with some of the things your employer does either.

I do respect you for telling people here that you work for them, though. I just hope you will ask yourself every now and then if it still feels ok to do so. That's often a pretty good indicator of whether or not it is ok. Sometimes a better indicator than the law, even.