Ancestors

Written by Dan Goodin on 2025-01-17 at 16:57

If you're choosing locally owned businesses for your coffee, groceries or other things, kudos for supporting alternatives to corporate-owned outlets. A reminder that paying with cash allows them to keep the full proceeds rather than sharing them with moneygrubbing banks and payment processors.

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Written by Dan Goodin on 2025-01-17 at 17:15

privacy is another good reason for paying with cash. What's the point of using encrypted comms or ad blockers or taking other privacy-preserving measures and then buying everything with a payment card? Payment cards allow data brokers to track every purchase you make, every business you visit and when. When you split a check with someone else, it lets them know who your friends and coworkers are. The amount of privacy lost using payment cards is astounding.

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Written by mathew on 2025-01-17 at 18:42

@dangoodin Digital contactless payments (like Apple and Google wallets) use temporary tokens rather than credit card numbers, which makes it significantly harder for vendors to track you.

https://robots.net/fintech/how-apple-pay-tokenization-works/

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Toot

Written by Dan Goodin on 2025-01-17 at 19:05

@lpar

I didn't know that. Correct me if I'm wrong, Google and Apple will then have all the info that the payment card providers would have normally, yes?

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Descendants

Written by mathew on 2025-01-17 at 19:10

@dangoodin I don't know about Google. Apple Wallet shows all your transactions, so clearly they have the technical ability to look at your full transaction history. I trust Apple more than I trust random merchants, though. I wouldn't trust Google, since they're an advertising company.

Apple's contract with Goldman Sachs apparently doesn't allow Goldman to use the payment history for targeting, or sell it to others.

For people really into privacy, store loyalty/discount cards are a big thing to look out for, as obviously those allow even cash transactions to be de-anonymized. (Unless they're the plain paper type with holes punched out or that get stamped.)

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