I don’t think this is necessarily new for credit cards...the deal has always been that cards have perks in exchange for them gaining valuable profiling info (e.g. “1% cash back on restaurants!” and in exchange they have a good idea how people spend at restaurants).
The problem is, and always has been, that in exchange for some paltry “rewards” you have no idea just who gets sold what, or for how long, etc.
And this is a major new problem primarily because of how big and pervasive Google is, and how they’re into every business. This means I’m no longer sharing a few silly restaurant purchases with buyers of that data in the restaurant business, I’m enabling a crazy machine-learned madness that is hyper-connected to literally everything else I do. This should be illegal but our laws are too slow to catch up with powerful tech.
The problem is, and always has been, that in exchange for some paltry “rewards” you have no idea just who gets sold what, or for how long, etc.
And this is a major new problem primarily because of how big and pervasive Google is, and how they’re into every business. This means I’m no longer sharing a few silly restaurant purchases with buyers of that data in the restaurant business, I’m enabling a crazy machine-learned madness that is hyper-connected to literally everything else I do. This should be illegal but our laws are too slow to catch up with powerful tech.