Comment by notepad0x90
Comment by notepad0x90 5 hours ago
When an individual stalks a person without their consent, it is considered unlawful. Why is it ok for websites to do this?
Perhaps what is missing is a criminal law that forbids deliberate non-consensual tracking of a person's activity. Even in public.
Recording someone as you happen to be recording something in public (including CCTV) is not deliberate or targeted towards an individual. But even in public, if someone followed you around tracking what you're doing (even without recording you), that shouldn't be lawful. Public figures and law enforcement activity based on probable cause being the exceptions.
Can anyone think of any reasonable counter-arguments to this?
A counter argument is that stalking in itself, in the US at least, is not unlawful. It becomes unlawful once someone starts threatening another person. So the digital analog would be to allow tracking as long as the site doing the tracking doesn't threaten the people that are being tracked.