It may surprise some folks here on HN, but in the real world, the vast majority of people don't care if merchants "know who they are". I'd bet that there are more people want merchants to know who they are than there are people who explicitly don't want them to know. But that said, the vast majority simply don't care. Just my opinion, of course.
I think it's more like "the vast majority simply don't care, until they do". That is, I think most people think "Who cares if merchant XYZ knows I changed my shampoo brand", but when people are actually shown the full set of data that is known about them, and how that data is correlated with with tons of other data sources, and that data is used to make fairly accurate predictions about your behavior which affects what products and services are promoted to you, that's when your average person goes "holy shit!"
Right now it's just "out of sight, out of mind" and the full capabilities of what is possible with aggregated data is just not apparent to your average person.
meh, people here in Germany are privacy focused as hell and even here nobody cares for more than five minutes when some data scandal breaks, of which we have at least one every year now.
AI, surveillance capitalism, manipulation and so on have been in pop-culture and news for years now, 'the social dilemma' just aired on netflix and a lot of people seem to have watched it, there's a documentary about 'big data' on TV every month, every other sci-fi movie has it as a plot point, we're all aware of it. People are genuinely indifferent about it. People will complain about it in theoretic debates but the number of people who actually delete the apps off their phone is basically zero, which tells you what you need to know.
