What you guys are talking about is not inconsistent with what I said. Private businesses are not public property. To behave consistently, non-fraudulently, they must disclose what they are doing.
However, fundamentally, the problem are not these private businesses, it's the government. In the eyes of those who are in control, everything is theirs and nothing is private. They infect everything and use their system of regulations, threats, legal, etc, to force stores to give them this information, against the consent of the users of said business. What is a business to do? Go against the government and have legal nightmares, or comply and keep running a business. Sadly, most people don't care about principles and will just comply.
I was speaking an ideal. In the current system we are millions of miles from an ideal and government does whatever the hell it wants because the people allow them.