Do I have a choice, other than cancelling all of my MasterCard cards? This business of tracking and profiling is increasingly evil. If I dystopically discovered that someone has been following me around all the time, writing down everything I look at or do or purchase, in public and at home, I could not tolerate it.
Your only option is to refuse cards altogether because they've all been selling anonymized data on you for years. The big hedge funds pay big dollars for direct lines of data from the credit card companies.
A lot of attention in the press is given to Google et. al. about purchase profiling and tracking for ads. But the concept of purchase profiling has existed really since the invention of the credit card. As others have mentioned hedge funds have brokered this data for decades - but for some reason it has not been covered as excruciatingly as it has for tech companies. While I disapprove of the practice overall I would bet that tech companies are actually a more responsible steward (jail warden?) for this data than credit card bureaus, precisely because the spotlight is on them and also we have come a long way for data security in general.
There needs to be much more coverage of this in the contemporary press as it is applied to credit card companies, agnostic of tech co.'s making it a joint venture.
I believe credit card co.'s gave this process momentum early on and tech co.'s are just taking it and running with it.
The same can be said for Google location tracking vs. Verizon's straight-up selling that data as an asset.
Yes non-tech companies have done this forever, but it was only when online tracking started that the amount of data you could collect on people exploded. And Google, Facebook etc. figured out how to monetize it much more effectively, generating the lions share of its revenues through such ads.
So IMO tech companies are well deserving of the criticism they’re facing.
Also, tech acts as a (mostly) reliable steward of this data because they can monetize it so well. If 90% of the revenues of Target came from advertising, we would probably not have had the massive leak of cc data. For most traditional businesses, this data is an additional source of revenue, not the primary one.
The reason tech companies get the spotlight is because there are times when the tracking is so much in your face. For example, if I look up specs on a pair of Bose headphones, I get plastered with ads for Bose for the next couple months (unless I flush my cookies, and/or browse anonymously or use an ad blocker). Yes, I know what is going on behind the scenes, but it still feels like stalking.
It is somewhat ironic that Google is probably more privacy focused and has better security than any other company in the fortune 500 and yet they seem to get some of the most negative criticism here.
You can be extremely ethical about your factory farm but it's still a factory farm.
Google is in the business of utilising your data in the interest of advertising. No matter how you sugar coat it, the core of the business is tracking people and exploiting that data.
Are they doing their best to be careful and ethical? It sure seems like it, but that doesn't solve the issue.
The free services they and many tech companies provide for free are just payment for your data. The majority of people don't realise this implicit connection and many others do realise it but are happy with the transaction. But it's important to note that they undermine the ability to provide these services more ethically by setting a social norm of incredible services that are "free".
Edit: I will add that the cost and benefit to society of this kind of service provision is complex and nuanced, Google has obviously provided incredible value and society has decided that advertising is a fair price to pay, else they wouldn't be around still. But the true effects of immense tracking and advertising are still yet to play out completely.
Oh, of course. Google is actually really benign. They don't sell your data. They just automatically scrutinize it in unfathomable detail to make as much money as possible when they pimp you out to anybody else who wants to manipulate you.
Please accept our sincere apologies--Google is such a nice company with a 100% ethical business model!
Like you mention one of the most obvious reasons that Google does not sell user information is because it would not make good business sense. These immense profiles they're building on everybody are part of their 'secret sauce' and simply selling those would not be good for business.
When they're choosing to not engage in behavior that no company in their shoes would engage in, it's hardly praise worthy and I think indeed that ridiculing it as a 'positive' for them is completely fair. So let's change the game a bit. If, somehow, their business changed or evolved such that selling user information directly was a profitable part of some business strategy - do you think they would still choose not to? What if I asked you, not that long ago, whether you think Google would be willing to build a search engine in China completely accepting (and thus arguably implicitly endorsing) all state level censorship engaged in by China?
I do think that Google at one time sincerely held the sort of anti-corporate-establishment view of 'don't be evil.' But it's much easier to moralize when you don't have the option of going against those morals to the tune of billions of dollars accompanied by immeasurable influence.
> the most obvious reasons that Google does not sell user information is because it would not make good business sense
On the contrary, it is a good business model and Google does it. They sell ad targeting, and targeting ads is based on accessing personal user data and making its results available to anybody who wants to pay. With each targeting of an ad the ad buyers can track more profiled users.
If I target my ads to left-handed Hungarian mimes, and someone clicks on that ad and comes to my site, what do I know about that person? What user data has Google told me about them?
I provided money to Google. Google provided [people, or perhaps bots] and told me they were left-handed Hungarian mimes. The user's information has passed from Google to me. I just tagged that person "left-handed Hungarian mime" in my database.
Now, you can invent new words and call that something other than a sale, but...
The tech industry is great. Package up software, give it a SKU, put it in a store, have people come in, exchange money for it, and walk out: They're very happy to call that a sale, not a license, but a license is what it is. Happy to use the word "sale" when it confuses the customer and benefits them.
But start talking about selling user data to advertisers, nope, don't like the word "sale" any more, even though the advertisers are handing over money and walking away with data they are free to use. Odd.
Ok but is anyone doing that? Even if technically possible is that a violation of the ToS? (I don't know the answer to either of these questions, but I expect that the answer leans towards "no" for both).
>If I target my ads to left-handed Hungarian mimes, and someone clicks on that ad and comes to my site, what do I know about that person?
Nothing, unless they register there, and if your goal is to convert left-handed Hungarian mimes, then you probably know about your target audience already. You've learned something about a tracking cookie. That's only valuable if you can continue to track the user.
This captures Google’s and FB’s business model perfectly.
Not matter how you sugarcoat it, if you work for Google or FB or any other ad blasting company, you help further the model of selling data of people’s private lives to the highest bidder and ad spam them throughout the internet for months.
I'm not so sure it's so clear in that page you linked to. Google do also sell the largest analytics/user-tracking platform that exists (Google Analytics). That page you linked to seems to hinge around what constitutes 'personal information' which I'm sure others have differing opinions about but does go back to the parent's point: Google is in the business of selling your data. It maybe does it in a controlled way, segregating by client properties, or removing certain personally identifying information, but it's still selling your data.
It looks like they are back in the green now. I appreciate the dialogue it sparked and I can appreciate it takes a bit of courage to take part in a topic that's contentious toward where you work.
You're right–people often conflate "selling" with "using internally to sell ads." There's a difference, and it's meaningful, but the point is that Google's business model is based on gathering and exploiting as much data about you as possible
Yes. And isn't it also the case that, by offering their very elaborate targeting capabilities to advertisers, they still leak your personal data to 3rd parties, though indirectly? After all, the fact that a certain personalized ad appears in your page confirms to the advertiser that you are in their carefully crafted target group.
(I work for Google, but not on ads and I have no social knowledge)
I think that one thing Google tries to do is to make identifyingly small demographics not possible. As you say, that would leak personal info when the user clicked.
That's not true either, but that's a common misconception. Google makes the bulk of it's ad revenue from search ads. Two people issuing the same search query will see the same ads (for the most part). Hence, Google could still make money without user targeting - unlike Facebook.
I'm surprised that this comment was downvoted so much. I actually work at Google. I don't know if anyone is still going to read this, but I thought I would comment just in case.
I said "for the most part". There are multiple reasons why different users can see different ads:
Ads might be geo targeted ("Only show this to users in New York.").
There is some stochasticity in the serving process. Ads can run out of budget. Different data centers might have cached different things in cache.
Different advertisers that are eligible to show for a certain query can bid different amounts depending on the user, for example though RLSA [1].
But anyway ads personalization is not essential to Google's business model (except display ads and maybe youtube ads).
I like how you say "personalised ads are now essential aside all those times it is". The fact remains, personalised ads is always going to be far more profitable than non-personalised ads. You don't need to be an insider in Google to understand this. Moreover Google didn't even invent the concept of personalised adverts to begin with.
I'm old enough to remember when we had the same arguements about supermarket loyalty cards which track your purchases and sends out personalised deals. Now people just accept that happens but there was a massive uproar about it back in the 80s or 90s (I forget precisely when but it was a good few years ago now).
I honestly don't blame Google for doing what they're doing. It makes perfect business sense. What I do object to is Google employees (assuming you are who you say you are) trying to argue that Google don't make a business from personalised ads when it's pretty easy to prove they do and nearly every single member of HN has observed that it action. For the record, I also object to people argue who "X is definitely not y" while acknowledging that there are a whole plethora of examples where their arguement isn't completely factually accurate - that kind of dumb get out clause is just insult on everyone's intelligence.
No they don't sell your data they just sell "access" to your data. The bits don't leave Google servers.
Your assertion and supporting link are nothing more than semantics though. But if those semantics make you personally feel better then fine. But I think there's very few people who think that such a semantic distinction matters.
As we found out, they buy the data - this time from Mastercard and collect a detailed profile of every user, maybe more detailed than 3-letter agencies have.
Yes it is. Personally, I dislike tracking and don't mind disparaging Google for it - but I think in this case reporting like this manages to miss the heart of the problem and mischaracterize the situation.
If you want to still use a "credit card" online without being tracked by the MasterCards or Visas of the world (or even individual merchants), then check out https://privacy.com/ .. It lets you generate a new credit card number for every transaction if you want.
I'm not affiliated with them.. Just a satisfied user. (Although happy to hand out referral links.)
If I understand the way the process works, no. The credit card is attached (via privacy.com) to a checking account via ACH. So if you get a refund (or perform a chargeback) on one of your credit cards, then the resulting funds are just deposited into your checking account.
The issue is individual tracking vs aggregate tracking. Tech companies now a days are starting to target individuals based on their individual patterns. This is quite a bit different than aggregate tracking based on group trends. For instance if you see a link to a Credence Clear Water video after watching a video of Under the Watchtower, it makes a lot of sense. On the other hand if you see a link to a lecture from Leonard Susskind -- then that's going to be exclusively the result of personalized tracking and it feels invasive.
And the example I'm giving there is the most completely innocuous possibility there is. This gets much worse when, for instance, politicians will (and to some degree already are) creat[ing] multiple mutually incompatible versions of themselves to sell to different demographics and ultimately even individuals. That's not cool, and you can come up with far worse scenarios that this sort of individualized tracking.
>>> but for some reason it has not been covered as excruciatingly as it has for tech companies.
The bank were not spending millions on the web talking how about they profile you to "improve your experience". They were mostly silent about that. That's why Google/FB/you name it is super for me : it says aloud what happens behind closed doors since ages.
I mean just look at the snake-oil bullshit wording Google are using to describe what they do here:
"Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information,”
I mean, I guess there are proper cryptographic means by which you could achieve something that matches that description.
But does _anyone_ trust the worlds biggest advertising company to be doing that???
"Anonymized" always deserves scare quotes, because there ain't such thing as "anonymized"; there's only "anonymized until correlated with other data sets".
Anyway. Yes, I do trust that of all parties, Google actually would both develop and deploy whatever that "double-blind encryption technology" is. Still, it's not the problem.
I think we need to stop dancing around the real issue with all that talk about PII. No, I really don't care about my PII just leaking somewhere. I care about what people do with them. It's what companies do with PII, "anonymized" or not, that's the problem. Advertising, upselling, price discrimination. Those are the real problems.
I don't doubt one bit that they have people capable and probably even willing to get the crypto right.
I _strongly_ doubt they have the corporate will or motivation to actually put it into production. I'd go so far as to say "getting it right" is antithetical to their (enormously profitable and deeply entrenched) business model.
I don't know about that. Measuring ad impact is extremely valuable. What is interesting to me is the obvious bias of being the seller of ads as well as the impact measurement provider.. fox guarding the henhouse and all
If they sold it to Mastercard as double blind I personally would trust them on it. Lying to consumers seems to turn out fine but lying to large corporations I would bet gets expensive and my experience is that a large org will bend over backwards to meet the letter (if not the spirit) of what they say.
What you're probably worried about is an entity being able to fingerprint you based on a few simple data points and a profile of someone who fits those data points. Which is possible, and increasingly accurate.
having sat during conversations at a large credit card company it turns out 4 to 5 transactions are all that is needed to identify a person.
meta data like where you made purchases when you made purchases and how much you spent and maybe a few other details are all you need 4 or 5 times to de-anonymize
full disclosure... I have 3 credit cards from this company....at this point I cannot imagine writing checks and carrying cash for daily use... I am not sure this battle can be won at this point.
Other companies are different: Google is unique in the sense that they have - or if they want, they have enough data to build - an extremely rich and complex profile including very intimate details of a given person.
There is no other company (or a government agency) that knows exactly where you are, how you spend your time, what your precise interests are, what your fears and hopes are (based on your search history), your relationship network, including secret lovers, and so on.
Avoiding being tracked by Google is almost impossible these days, given that everybody uses Gmail, GA, Android and so on.
Credit cards know how much you spend at Whole Foods with a certain transaction amount. This I always assumed was tracked and could be used/sold by the credit card companies. This article tends to imply that MasterCard is getting the actual list of things that you buy at a store. I would hope that for this to happen the store must also be involved in selling the individual item list to the credit card company. I was hoping that stores were not doing this or I would have heard something about it, but maybe it would not really be news at this point in the data selling game.
I think you could buy an anonymous prepaid/gift card periodically, though I don't know if there's any restriction that prevents you from buying certain things (probably you can't use it for airline check-in). Wish this kind of things could be done more easily in future.
> The big hedge funds pay big dollars for direct lines of data from the credit card companies.
Not just hedge funds. All finance institutions buy ( "share" ) data from and with each other. Even if you "opt out" ( we should be defaulted to opt-in rather than having to opt out but that's another discussion ), banks have a sneaky trick of slightly changing your ToS and giving you 30 days to "opt out" again. It's one of the reasons why every year, people get "new terms" in the mail. If you look closely, you'll see a slip of paper in the pile of papers about "privacy" rights and saying you have 30 days or so to let your bank know you don't want them to "share" your data.
Also, keep in mind that anonymized data is anonymous in a local sense, not a global sense. Even if PII is removed from one data vender, you can link anonymized data from a variety of data venders to "unanonymize" you. If you have one set of PII ( say like your employer ), then it's really effortless to link you with the anonymized data.
If you have search history from google, data dump from facebook and CC data, then one could pretty much peer into most people's homes and lives without much problem. You could know people better than their spouses do and in many instances, better than they do themselves.
The difference between a slave or serf and a free man isn't paid labor ( as even slaves were paid for their labor ), but the right to prevent intrusion into their lives. A free man had privacy. Slaves had no right to privacy. We are moving into a world with little to no privacy. Well not all of us. The wealthy are moving into a world of greater privacy.
Buying up islands. Highly walled and heavily guarded compounds. Opaque offshore wealth centers.
Wait, so for example hedge funds can buy aggregated data from BoA about how much is spent at Walmart on BoA CCs on a daily/weekly basis, wouldn't that data be very valuable prior to an earning call/report, somewhat like insider trading (but I guess not technically?)?
"The company said people can opt out of ad tracking using Google’s “Web and App Activity” online console. Inside Google, multiple people raised objections that the service did not have a more obvious way for cardholders to opt out of the tracking, one of the people said."
I did read the article. That's discovering that someone is stalking you, until and unless you tell them you'd rather "opt out" even though you never "opted in" the evil stalking. Meanwhile, all shops and businesses you get near to or purchase from are calling the stalker to let him know what you're doing -- how do you "opt out" of these?
That's free market for you; meaning people with more money than you set up a system so even handling money itself costs you money and they also try to squeeze even more money doing shady things such as tracking your shopping patterns.
This is the kind of stuff where the government should have a heavy hand on regulations (unfortunately the members of the government like anyone else are incentivized by money so guess who has a lot of it to "lobby" them.)
It maybe isn't an ideal solution, but it has a lot of upsides. Advertisers (and ad middlemen like Google) bet that they can sell more stuff by drilling deeper and deeper into people's lives.
But the bottom falls out of all that when people decide to opt out of large parts of the commercial ecosystem.
Track your finances instead, the same way you would with a fitness app, and get that dopamine hit from seeing your savings increase. Feel secure in the knowledge that when the next major economic slump hits -- when, not if -- you'll be able to easily ride it out, maybe even enjoy a nice vacation at discounted rates.
The massive growth of ad blockers was an immune response to the excesses of advertisers on the web. Commercial minimalism is the only way to respond to all this crap happening everywhere else.
However, you have other problems: If you have an account, or even a consistent shipping address, Amazon knows what you're buying. So you'd need to anonymize where you're shipping packages to, the names on those packages, and you'd need to register new Amazon accounts regularly with new email addresses to avoid them profiling your purchasing habits.
This makes me wonder if there is a business model for 'anonymous proxy' companies, where you do the shopping at your favourite online webshops, but handle actual ordering, payment and final delivery to your home via the proxy company, who guarantee your privacy for a small additional fee, or subscription charge.
Maybe this exists already. The difficulty would be in offering a good usability (how do you get that Amazon product you want in your local shopping basket).
Wouldn't that company have all your information? What would make me trust them? Seems more dangerous than buying directly from multiple retailers, for example.
That business would attract all the bad actors looking to use stolen credit cards and then get banned by the merchant processors for too many chargebacks. And no one can guarantee your privacy, unless they're deleting data very quickly, but the merchant processors wouldn't like that nor would the government.
It would have the same due-dilligence requirements as any webshop and validate your payment method (which could be any method, like iDeal, and even credit card, where the payment processor doesn't get to see the exact order details, but a 'proxied order').
You are right about the privacy guarantee, but there is the issue of trust in any business transaction. Why am I using ProtonMail/VPN? Because they have privacy + security as their primary USP and it is reflected in their business (transparency, privacy policies, compliance, certification, etc.). They work hard to earn and keep my trust, and I pay them to do just that.
I am no expert but probably you can let your company be audited by some trusted party on adherence to privacy promises and prove that you comply.
Having that they can keep my data in storage for as long my government requires by law.
Amazon Locker storage boxes can be used without any address and with a pseudonym as your Amazon account. You receive a six digit code to pick up your stuff. Only works for items that are fulfilled by Amazon, though.
As long as you don't travel on a highway where the money will be seized by law enforcement by use of civil asset forfeiture due to your suspiciously carrying cash.
There is no legal restriction of how much money you can carry around with you in the US, I believe. When you cross a national border you need to declare it and if you buy casino chips or deposit into a bank, they will report you to the government. But the cops can and often do "arrest" the money and will take much smaller amounts of money from you if they find it.
The limit is not 10,000. There may be an official number where that starts happening but I have seen it happen (completely anecdotal) with amounts as low as $800.
As long as this is possible. In China's social credit experiments cash money is no longer an option, and in countries such as Sweden they are thinking of getting rid of cash too (though public opinion has shifted somewhat with growing awareness of privacy issues).
Hey at least the credit card companies are fully transparent - all that is clearly outlined in the 20-page size-3 font terms and conditions you signed up with! /s
It's ridiculous that credit cards, the primary mode of online purchases and strongly preferred by physical retailers, is dominated by just two/three companies... all of which freely sell your purchase histories to other companies.
Wasn't this "Web and App Activity" just this month found to keep its own location history when Location Services are disabled? Seems like they've loaded a lot of different behaviors into this one setting.
And if I still want to use some of those features (because some are useful and I don't care about that data), it doesn't appear I can opt out of this specifically?
Cash is tracked by the banks. It's usually pretty easy too, especially with things like coffee shops that take a lot of 20s and give a lot of 5s. Most people take out 20s, so it's pretty easy to know who was likely at some place at some day or week.
How do you unGoogle? They have my phone, my email. Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. I doubt Visa and Amex are far behind, it's free money for them so there is no point in canning Master. What a disaster! Ad supported Internet is the root of the problem.
Did you read Chaos Monkeys? What about Dragnet Nation? Both (of which are not new) peek behind the curtains you're concerned about. Both are recommended, and freightening. It's only going to get worse.
The best bit - relevant to this HN privacy discussion - is about two-thirds in. It's where FB cracks the code (breaks the back of privacy) and heads for advertisers' nirvana. And that was 5+ yrs ago.
And yes, his style is very entertaining. I hope you enjoy it.
You can use ios or lineageos. You can use an email such as protonmail (although I personally find them just a touch shady, they're no doubt miles better than gmail) or host your own. Don't shop at whole foods. Pay with cash.
I believe a competitor of theirs has been actively trying to spread distrust of them on HN. I don't remember the details well, but I think they allege that ProtonVPN and ProtonMail aren't independent from each other when they claim they are.
There is a smear campaign going on, but not about precisely this. The smear campaign is that since ProtonVPN is free, it must be doing something nefarious.
ProtonMail and ProtonVPN are legally separate, but they are both part of the Proton family of projects which originated from CERN.
I'm not sure what competitor you're referring to, I don't think they have many of those (tutanota, maybe? Or startmail?) but I assure you I don't work for one of those. There's not another email provider I have significantly more trust in or that I think does everything right while protonmail does everything wrong, there's just a minor sticky feeling that I have using them.
Not using google is actually a piece of cake. Ther are reasonable competitors for nearly all of their services, except maybe translate and maps. Though I have been looking at OSM a lot lately.
I, personally, use an DuckDuckGo, an iPhone and Apple mail. Amazon isn't an issue really- just buy whatever you were going to get on amazon somewhere else - it's pretty rare that I find a noticeable price difference (unless we're talking about the cheap off branded stuff on amazon - but I don't want things like that anyway).
DeepL is a good alternative to Google Translate, though it is quite a bit more limited in terms of features and languages. I often find DeepL translations to be of higher quality than Google's (for the 2-3 languages I regularly translate between).
not using google is easy, not losing data for 15+ years and counting is significantly harder. even Apple dropped my photos due term of service change, I had to scramble gigabites off internet into disks and now my collection is an unindexed mess.
To be fair to Google, they (mostly) make it fairly easy to move out; exporting your Photos with Takeout returns a nice archive where each image is accompanied by a JSON file with metadata. It's not any standard format, as far as I can tell, but should be easy enough to massage into whatever you want.
Well, it is somewhat of an uphill battle, sure, but every hill has a top ;-)
As for internet, you can always get yourself a VPS and tunnel everything through that, so your monopoly ISP doesn't get to see anything of what you do.
For email, there's Fastmail, which is great and the web UI is clean, simple and fast. If your phone is supported, you can install LineageOS on it without any Google apps.
A couple of years ago, I decided to go with Runbox for email along with some self-hosted solutions. It has been great - Gmail over IMAP is relegated to newsletter subscriptions. I also use LineageOS on my phones and tablets.
Unfettered, profit-at-all-costs is the problem. Paying for something brings no shred of chance that your data isn't being harvested. Zero.
Most people pay for credit cards by way of yearly fees, they track you. Purchase music? Your music is cross referenced in the name of discoverability. Hardware? Same.
Some of those things might be helpful in some contexts, and in others not. That fuzzy line is the discourse.
With all of that said, to cite the locus of all evil as “ad supported” as the problem is a logical fault line.
[correction: Apple Pay Cash should indeed be a workable shield.] Using Apple Pay [not the "Cash" feature] only hides your details from the retailer, not from the credit card company nor evidently from Google.
It appears that Apple Pay cash doesn’t share much, although they do say ‘We may disclose information that is not personally identifiable for other purposes.’
What they mean exactly by ‘personally identifiable’ is open to interpretation.
re: Whole Foods, I've never heard of a place that was a food desert but for Whole Foods. You should take your business somewhere else if you don't want Amazon to have data on your grocery purchases.
Funny anecdote, my fiance used to live in midtown Detroit near the Whole Foods. At the time the groceries situation was worse, it was more-or-less a food desert other than that Whole Foods [0].
I don't know how folks who can't afford a car would get groceries (an hour round trip on the bus, I guess), but that can be said about nearly everything in Michigan. The whole wealth bootstrapping problem is really unsolved out there, you can't get started on anything without like $5k for a car and car-related expenses.
Moving to Europe? I have always despised creditcards, their business model is anti consumer and legalised theft. Luckily I live in a country that has superior payment options.
In Germany direct debit (pull) is common and the EU is currently rolling out instant wire transfers (push). Either way cuts out the third party as you're paying directly from your bank account and banks are far more regulated wrt. privacy.
Unfortunately, you'll find it rather annoying to pay for a rental car. If you use a debit card, they'll pull an additional €250 deposit, which you won't get back until you return the car.
If you pay by credit card, it just goes through without having to pay the deposit. It's one of the reasons why I begrudgingly got a Mastercard, and also for the travel insurance.
That's basically all I use it for, though. I think there's some additional electronics insurance or something, but the basic warranties here are pretty good already.
I feel like as consumers we've lost this battle. If it's profitable the other companies will do it, too. I'm hoping that as consumers keep getting more screwed we can get some regulation to give us at least a little control and visibility into our data.
Are you referring to GDPR? As far as I can tell, the data is allegedly anonymous, so not subject to GDPR. Even if it weren't, Google doesn't exactly have a good track record of respecting privacy or privacy related laws. They've been known to "accidentally" harvest wifi traffic in bulk. They drive spy cars around taking pictures or everything and everyone.
If they were anonymous Google wouldn't be able to match purchases against ad views or let users opt out. I suppose they are just exchanging something like a hash from customer data, so technically Google doesn't get personal information.
To clarify, in US even debit cards are primarily Visa or Mastercard, whereas in Europe they're not. E.g. Norway uses BankAxept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankAxept
Danish person here. We mostly pay by Dankort, which is the standard national debit card, I would bet more than 99% of card payments here are direct debit.
> People in Europe don't use credit cards offline.
What? Of course we do. If anything, Europeans are less likely to use credit cards online (though that is slowly changing), instead opting for bank transfers or online debit cards.
Effectively that's already the case. I gurantee if you live in modern society, eg. drive a car, use a phone, go on public transit, shop online or in stores with plastic etc... your "pattern of life" would be trivial to put together.
If you consider in aggregate all of the government and corporate tracking and surveillance these days, the only way to opt out is to move to an off grid shack in the Montana woods and live a lifestyle like Ted Kaczynsky.
What a flawed analogy. This isn’t anything close to stalking. You are using a credit card processing service. If you don’t like what they do with your data, use a different one or just pay everything with cash.
Pretty sure there are a lot of companies that do not offer their hires the option to be paid in cash, its bank account or nothing. Plus some countries are moving to card-only economy where some stores don't take cash.
How long until a big-tech company starts to log, track, and connect banknote serial numbers from ATM to store? I wouldn't be surprised if ATMs already record the serial number of each note they distribute.
