Going to site A, not providing any info, then going to site B, C and D and seeing ads to site A haunting you is one thing, capturing your name and email is a new level. If you don't use a tracking blocker, clearing cookies is not always going to work, these persistent trackers are quite sophisticated, they use local storage if possible, IP address, header information and whatever is possible to be able to identify someone, there is a huge industry behind it. But this one is taking it a little bit too far, scary.
On the other side, most startups including YC ones, use some sort of tracking for analytics to improve usability and internal flow, so advocating against all trackers and for all users installing a blocker is a double edge sword.
Transparency: I'm a co-founder at Perfect Audience and we believe strongly in the benefits of retargeting for the end user, for the advertiser and for the content publisher.
I don't see a moral issue with retargeting because at its heart it's anonymous - all we know about a user is a string of sites and maybe search words. However, as soon as that data is correlated against personal information, as soon as the real world data and the digital paper trail are correlated and identifiable it becomes sufficiently creepy to me. Who knows - maybe 5 years from now this will seem innocent and benign compared to the mind-reading banners on the bus stops but this seems like a line in the sand I am willing to draw today.
Yes, I agree this is where the line passes, I don't see a big moral issue with ad retargeting as long as there is an opt out option and a privacy policy somewhere to read. We don't like it when we see ads we don't like (or worse when people looking behind our shoulders can know a lot about us just based on the ads we get on our laptop in the coffee house), but we all like it when we use it to promote our own projects, or when an actually relevant ad shows up
On the other side, most startups including YC ones, use some sort of tracking for analytics to improve usability and internal flow, so advocating against all trackers and for all users installing a blocker is a double edge sword.