
Industry is still wondering what went wrong with tracking.
Frank Hayes over at Storefront Backtalk asks “When Is Data Collection Creepy?” That’s a really good question now that ordinary people are waking up to the possibility that anyone and everyone can track them online and in real life. The post touches on but doesn’t quite illuminate that the biggest difference is one of atoms versus bits. When surveillance was physical Newtonian physics limited what could be done. We didn’t need laws or policies stating that you couldn’t surveil all of the people all of the time because to do so wasn’t physically possible. Because we have never had that capability before, we do not have any experience with it from a policy-making standpoint.