Follow the Cookie Trail

As young kids, readers may recall the story of Hansel and Gretel, how they dropped crumbs to guide them out of the dark forest (alas waylaid by the wicked witch). A modern day Grim Tale is  how Facebook tracks your electronic cookies to sites which support affiliate sites that support "frictionless sharing". Perhaps it might be better termed directionless baring as it blithly ignores the notion of opt-in and user permissiveness. Apparently mining the trails of your (mis)discretions has become such a lucrative value-add that SNS are willing to hoover up these cookies to better target ads and onsell to companies. 

Does it make logic that an informed consumer would accept the implications of tracking their movements even when not logged in? It is the difference between accepting the terms of entry into a store (right to search bag) but having the extra-jurisdiction to apply such outside the direct web site? If your local supermarket surpetitiously added in a GPS tracker to your car, would people feel the same respect and dignity of the customer? Perhaps it may seem a trivial matter but the principle is who controls the digital bread that you leak across the internet?

For example, violation of (rather ambiguous) wire-tap laws means that Facebook is vulnerable to class action suits. The problem is that there is no monetary damage that is a direct or consequential result of cookie-tracking. All that remains is a sense of (nebulous) outrage over the privacy violation (which may be general damages) but at the moment, there is no duty binding SNS to take responsibility for the results of their data-mining.