1. Pointing to banks and credit cards is a red herring. The existence of abuses (or not) in one industry has no bearing on BANs. I use plastic as carefully as I surf the web, but financial services companies are highly regulated, have limits on what they can collect and and how they can use it, and are also in the spotlight for abuses.

2. Inquiries asking for concrete historical harms are also not terribly relevant. This industry hasn't been around that long, companies using the networks do not operate transparently, once they sell the data to another company all bets are off on tracing it back, plus there's just an inherent privacy intrusion in collection and use of potentially highly personal data without informed consent.

3. It's not as simple as "oh, they're just cookies, you can delete them or opt out". Far from it. We are building the capability to aggregate deep and wide dossiers of people's online behavior and linking that to real-world identity.

A few essential reads for why it's so hard for the consumer to understand, let alone manage, tracking:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-delete...
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/new-cookie-t...
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6170

Even if most of the BAN activity today is reasonably benevolent, the majority of people are creeped out at the potential of too much information being in any one entity's hands. Profit motive and lack of transparency are a steamroller compared to an individual's power to comprehend and deal with what could happen.

Individuals have a right to privacy, and the government may step in if those rights are abridged (which they are today). Sure, any individual can stalk any other individual on the web, but aggregating deep information, particularly where a person has not explicitly shared personal information with an account, and particularly across sites, about web visitors for commercial gain, without the informed consent of those visitors, and then doing who-knows-what with that data... that's the issue being addressed here.

There is a lot of privacy-sensitive activity that people engage in on the internet... physical and mental health, legal, youth, relationships, civil disobedience, whistleblowing... the list goes on and on. Plus, it's just plain no company's frickin' business to aggregate and sell lists of the web stores a person frequents, the news outlets and blogs a person reads, etc., etc., unless that person wants it to happen.

Anyone reading this comment should also check out the comment thread here: http://siliconangle.net/ver2/2009/09/30/gathering...