Now, imagine instead that this store has an employee who follows you around with a notebook that quietly nods and writes down everything you're doing. At the same time, they are talking on the phone with a third party.

You hear them say, "So their names is John Smith? All right, all right, all right. What is their medical situation? Cancer, you say? Yeah, they're looking at razors right now. They are wearing the new Nike shoes. Just sneezed. Again. They are looking at allergy medication now."...

Then you look around and notice that every person in the store is followed by one of these employees.

You freak out a little bit and leave the store. The next store has the same kind of employees. As soon as you enter, the phone rings. The employee from the previous store calls your new "supervisor". On the phone, you hear a voice describing everything you've just done next-door.

This is what this situation would look like in an imaginary world of 1900s.

You're on HN and "What's the difference" is really your question? 1. Friendly private human interaction shared by two people. 2. Data is collected, sent, analyzed, sold, shared, distributed, stolen, and abused in order to maximize profit across expansive markets at the expense of any respect for the user's privacy. The user is tracked, distracted, and tricked into obeying algorithmic market forces of massive and opaque breadth. Every piece of data ever accrued is collected and stored in order to create an invasive profile of a user's movements, decisions, actions, and relationships, so that predictive programming can be implemented in attempts to guess the state of the user's mind prior to the user coming to these conclusions, or at least to convince the user that this is what the user wants. The end goal is technology that effectively usurps the user's free will, so that the user is completely reliant upon it for basic decision-making. The goal is to destroy free will. A society in which every individual action is known by governments and corporations is not a healthy society. It is an electronic prison.

This just seems like such absurd hyperbole I can't tell if you are serious or not. "technology that effectively usurps the user's free will" "electronic prison"

I don't believe any of this. Nobody can usurp my free will no matter how much data they have on me. Heck, even if I told them every last piece of private information I knew about me, I doubt they could increase my spending even 1% more than I currently am with all the coupons and targeted advertising and subliminal marketing in the world.

I'm glad that you feel you are immune to these advances. That doesn't change the corporate agenda though. They want you to buy their stuff. You, me, everyone. They pay loads of money to teams of people dedicated to utilizing the latest technologies to bend your will to their desire, with whatever tricks their minds may conjure. They work in concert with others doing the same. It's "just business".

We have a global population that is addicted to their phones. A great deal of their worldview is shaped on a daily basis by a small illuminated screen that fits in the palm of the hand, full of deception and manipulation, which goes well beyond grocery shopping. The phone is an ideal espionage tool since, for most people, it is turned on and broadcasting constantly, and always at its user's side. I mentioned "electronic prison", scaling out from this, in the sense that law-abiding citizens are under constant surveillance, similar to inmates in a prison. We have the ability to move around of course, but we can hardly do so without being watched, which does not equate to actual freedom. The human experience is being overrun by addictive technology that manipulates our will through mechanisms that are totally unknown by the average user. It may seem like hyperbole because its full effects have not yet been understood. It's not like this is the end: this is just where we are today. The intrusion into our lives will only escalate.

1. Pretend it is the 1970s in East Berlin and someone follows you around, noting down every interaction you have with other humans and every bit of media you consume and collects this information in a file somewhere for future use. This is the horrifying and oppressive surveillance machine of a paranoid dictatorship.

2. Use a computer to the the exact thing automatically today. This is just the natural state of the world, nothing to do anything about it, move along.

There is a clear difference between 1970s East Berlin and now. Stasi spying propped up a system that provided a relatively low standard of living and a limited availability of consumer goods. Modern tracking of customers fuels a vibrant customer-good market that is a win-win for everyone.

I don't think it is ok for any entity to make notes of when you buy condoms and then spend the night at an adress you don't live on and infer whatever it infers from that and then sell this information to any other entity to do whatever it pleases with marketing or otherwise. Even if I make more money than the X% who still have a worse material standard today than the median East Berliner.

Except this technology is being used in China today to monitor the bulk of every purchase, every internet site visited and every message sent and received.

The Stasi hid cameras in handbags and behind buttons but regimes operating today do not need to operate in such corse ways.

Human, local, and friendly interaction vs mega corporation using a profile they built without asking that has pulled as much information on you as possible while simultaneously using algorithms trying to determine how to get you to buy as much stuff as possible and pushing advertisements right to your phone.

The computer is doing it invisibly so you're creating a huge and compounding information asymmetry. You think you're a good person so that's fine, but someone more ruthless than you will exploit it.

It would be like if that shopkeeper also followed you around town, followed you home, noticed what you read, tracked when you fell asleep, read your diary, and opened your mail.

It's rage-inducing because the 1900 shop keeper doesn't keep a book about you specifically, notes down your presence to the last second, follows you home or into other establishments, etc. Also his memory is not accurate and no tangible proof (it's just his word after all), so nobody can download his memory if they want to spy on you for whatever reason (dissident, whistleblower, etc.)