12 ms·
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
by ilove_banh_mi 8y ago
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.
- drtillberg 8y agoMaybe a simple NYCE debit card? Apparently they are widely accepted at POS.
- mtmail 8y agoFrom the article "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."
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoI 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?
- metafizikal 8y agoOn the other hand, most credit cards already sell transaction data to third parties.
- losteric 8y agoHey 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.
- mattigames 8y agoThat'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.)
- thaumaturgy 8y agoBuy less stuff. 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.
- Moru 8y agoOr do like the germans that remember the old times of big brother watching you. Use cash. When I'm shopping it isn't just the old ladys digging deep and long in their purse for the exact change, almost everyone pays with cash.
- 4ad 8y agoHow do I pay with cash on amazon.com?
- donarb 8y agoYou can buy Amazon gift cards with cash anywhere like drug and grocery stores.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoHowever, 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.
- DeepYogurt 8y agoPull money out at an ATM and pay for things with cash I guess. Not great, but it's an option.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoDo you think gift cards would shield you enough? I mean they can be tied to the card used to purchase. But are the data-mongers doing that?
- mulmen 8y agoGift cards can be purchased with cash.
- orbitingpluto 8y agoAs 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.
- mrep 8y agoI believe that limit is $10,000 and you never use a credit card when spending that amount of money because the transaction fees are too high.
- CynicalDio 8y agoThe 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.
- mrep 8y agoCare to tell your story because that is totally fucked up if a cop took a measly $800 in cash from you?
- tracker1 8y agoCash?
- doug3465 8y agoDo you really believe they stop tracking your data even if you opt out after recent events?
- unethical_ban 8y agohttps://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols by the way.
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoFollowed the link. Read the description at https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068 There is absolutely nothing written about this being a way to opt out of their purchasing and tracking credit card use.
- shostack 8y agoAnd 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?
- tjoff 8y agoI have to create a google account and link it to my mastercard somehow just to be able to opt out?!
- kappaseven 8y agoWasn'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.
- pointillistic 8y agoHow 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.
- anothergoogler 8y agore: 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.
- PNWChris 8y agoFunny 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. [0]: https://www.google.com/maps/search/midtown+detroit+groceries/@42.3446326,-83.0652096,14z/data=!3m1!4b1 https://www.google.com/maps/search/midtown+detroit+groceries...
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. Shop at Aldi. https://aldi.us/stores/ https://aldi.us/stores/
- losteric 8y agoOr pay cash!
- earenndil 8y agoYou 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.
- amelius 8y agoMove to Europe, where there are sane laws against this type of behavior.
- Tharkun 8y agoWhat makes you think MC and Google aren't doing the same thing in Europe?
- foepys 8y agoIf they do, I hope they get caught and have to pay 4% of their global revenue under GDPR.
- ionised 8y agoThere are laws against them doing this in Europe.
- dagw 8y agoBloody nanny state socialists and their business destroying government overreach. No wonder they'll never catch up with Silicon Valley. /s
- Tharkun 8y agoAre 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.
- codedokode 8y agoIf 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.
- paulie_a 8y agoConsidering in my experience most debit cards are typically MasterCard, good luck.
- colechristensen 8y agoYou never had a choice. Paying with plastic always meant that you were tracked and that data sold. If you don't like it, use cash.
- cm2187 8y agoBanking data has strong regulatory protection. I am surprised payment data hasn't.
- 3pt14159 8y agoCash 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.
- spydum 8y agonot even remotely the same league.. I've never once heard of cash analytics for spend habits the same I have seen for cardholder/loyalty programs.
- 3pt14159 8y agoIt's tracked to the person and has been for decades. It's used to fight crime, not to help advertisers.
- jonknee 8y agoWell then get your cash from a teller because it will not be scanned before it's handed to you.
- tomrod 8y agoInteresting. I haven't seen retail banks tracking cash this way.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- taurath 8y agoThe only choice is to lobby your government officials to create laws preventing this sort of data collection. End-users have zero power anymore except by collective action in the form of government regulations.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoWhat 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.
- mattigames 8y agoPretty 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.
- a3_nm 8y agoThe best way to encourage shops to accept cash, and generally encourage countries to stick with cash, is to use cash whenever possible.
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoHow 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.
- m1573rp34130dy 8y agobuy something your friends need at a place you rarely shop and get cash back...then go do your cash on hand shopping...
- tdb7893 8y agoI 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.
- noelsusman 8y agoYour 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.
- bigiain 8y ago"anonymized" 100% deserves/needs scare quotes around that. 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???
- spydum 8y agoOut of all the other possible parties that could have attempted this? Yup, I'd say I trust them the most.
- taneq 8y agoWhat Google can do and what they choose to do are two different things.
- bigiain 8y agoI 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.
- spydum 8y agoI 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
- microcolonel 8y agoMasterCard has also started cracking down on customers whose speech they dislike. A Patreon creator was just a couple weeks ago removed because his content was disliked by MasterCard, who gave Patreon basically no choice in the matter. I think that if Visa doesn't remain largely neutral (keeping its policies as minimally political as they are currently), there will be a considerable market for a principled creditor (maybe Discover becomes that, or a new player is born).
- prepend 8y agoDon’t worry, they only use it anonymously. Until they don’t want to.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoI'm with you. Short answer...pay cash.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoEffectively 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern-of-life_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern-of-life_analysis
- walrus01 8y agoIf 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. I am about 85% serious here.
- phobosdeimos 8y agoMoving 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.
- espadrine 8y agoWhich country is it? What payment systems do you use?
- HohPum1l 8y agoIn 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.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- tomcooks 8y agoBitcoin, minus LE EPIC CRIPTO CRAZEH, was supposed to fix this specific idiocy.
- xiphias 8y agoLightning network for Bitcoin has multiple privacy features, though it's still only in beta and will probably take a few years to have some adoption.