Firstly I think you are actually wrong in your assertion. Businesses have been at the forefront of computational techniques for accounting, inventory and customer tracking for hundreds of years.

More importantly though, less technological tracking of customers in the past totally does not matter at all.

What matters is if your competitors have access to these tools. This is a reality of modern business so unless a data law perfectly eliminates this possible data capture for all businesses, any business that does capture that data will have huge advantages over competitors.