I understand this privacy argument - but I'm wondering what the practical downside is of this "spying"?
I've been using credit cards online for decades and I am yet to encounter anything negative from doing so. I get that my credit card provider knows that I'm buying £X of goods from merchant Y. But unless that merchant is very specific, the card company doesn't know what I've bought.
And, if it did... so what? Perhaps I'm naive, but even if I was hiding (for example) my sexuality - what's the CC company going to do? Try to upsell me a rainbow themed card?
I try to take my privacy seriously, and I don't particularly want my interactions monitored and mined. But what are the actual, non-theoretical problems that this causes?
It's good you live somewhere where hiding your sexuality is not an issue.
But, for argument's sake let's say you can be put in jail or killed for your sexuality. You want to buy something from a specific store that caters exclusively to your sexual preferences. The CC company sells that to your government (or another entity wanting to enforce that), then you are arrested or killed, or you family harassed.
Basically people take for granted that they belong to the middle of the Gauss curve and forget this is neither true everywhere nor carved in stone, and certainly not consequence free.
Not to mention mass spying, which apparently every body is accepting now.
It feels like in the 30', where everybody is smooking cigarets and are think there is no problem right now with it, so they people raising concerns are not to be listened to.
A very serious concern and I completely agree. However, it also seems like the kind of government that would have you arrested, killed or family harassed for shopping at a particular store probably wouldn’t permit that kind of particular store?
Again, it’s a valid concern but the GP was about real world use cases and it seems that’s not really one?
And if this is the concern why not use cash or monero or whatever for this particular transaction, surely the concern does not extend to all other transactions you are making?
Metadata on credit card transactions you make at a pharmacy, smoke shop, adult toy store, or abortion clinic is sold to a range of entities including government agencies, adtech firms, insurance companies. Your travel habits and times you are often not at home also can be very revealing.
When this data inevitable leaks via hacks, or is used to target you when political tides change, suddenly you will be wishing we had all been normalizing alternatives.
I recommend everyone use tumbled bitcoin, monero, cash, or visa gift cards whenever possible. The less data we all give in aggregate to those seeking to sell changes in our behavior the better.
Your data pollution empowers entities that harm us all.
The majority of all mining is powered by green energy at this point. If anything the drive to get the lowest kilowatt hours possible is creating more demand for green energy innovation. It is a forcing function, like demand for porn brought down bandwidth costs.
I started in Monero after the Canadian trucker thing. The government response was scary. In no particular order, threats that got me interested in privacy coins:
1) Able to donate money without it being blocked (examples: Wikileaks, eight-wing political activism).
2) No trace of activity that can be used against me (examples: WWII, looks like it might happen again in the near future, situation is tense post-COVID).
3) When the next recession hits, want to have protections against government haircuts (a la Cyprus or the bail in mechanisms that were prepared after 2008).
Cryptos fit quite neatly into a threat model where my government going rogue seems to be possible but unlikely. It makes a lot of sense to me to have $1-10k in Monero as a weird emergency fund/political tool. Dunno how it will work out, this isn't really territory that has been open before. If cryptos weather the next recession and hold >50% of their value then I'd start looking to put more serious money in.
I typed what I meant to (unusually?). Haircut as in they go through accounts and trim the balance down by some %.
Although to be fair those sort of manoeuvres generally mean that a bank is going under, so a % loss can be a better outcome than losing everything. It depends.
not long ago here where i live today it was illegal to be gay, i would have been locked up/ chemically "treated"/ killed. It took people doing illegal things and being able to organise and communicate to build their defence and solidarity so they could stand together and push back against the violence and injustice of the state.
its not that the credit card company might sell you a rainbow card, its that you might not even get to exist.
Many things are illegal, but not immoral. You have probably broken the law in your life, most people have. ultimate surveillance is damaging to society as it strips away our ability to change "how things are done around here". I know a few sex workers whove had their bank accounts frozen and forced into cash/crypto, is that fair? are they really causing damage to society? theres many examples of sexism/racism from bank managers giving mortgages/loans with different rates depending on who they are talking to, could we use zkproofs to prove income/assets/liabilities without revealing personal information? amongst all the hype and speculation (caused by desperation in our current systems) crypto is about these issues and is doing real work to address them.
and thats before we even get into how things might change in the future. maybe its fine for a credit card company to know if you are gay today, what about in ten years? what if it becomes a crime again?
It's hard for you to know what purchases you MIGHT have done if you weren't constrained a priori to only making purchases from sellers that were big enough & sold products innocuous enough to get approval from one of the big 3 CC companies, or what products might have been available without this limitation.
>I understand this privacy argument - but I'm wondering what the practical downside is of this "spying"?
Other than the fact that "why do I need privacy, I'm not a criminal" (the battle cry of people who are lucky enough to have been raised in the 5 places on earth ruled by non-abusive governments) has been debunked a million times, you need to consider the fact that - just like the oodles of information gather on you by big tech - this gathering transforms you into a product, not a citizen.
Now, if you don't mind being treated like a shearable beast of burden, then, you're correct, that's not a problem.
First, the data is accessible by credit card provider, but also by several financial and technical intermediaries. Second, there is no way for any of those companies to guarantee that the data will never be leaked.
Then, in terms of consequences, it includes reputional risks, security risks people know your behavior patterns, and to be arrested for being at the wrong place and wrong time. Then is all the track record of governmental overreach that used this type of data, from arresting environmental activists to killings based on sexuality (for example). It happened in everywhere, and it still happens today.
> the impossibility of privacy is also not theoretical.
In that it's proven possible and how the world worked for thousands of years. The existence of KYC/AML and the ability of the state to surveil their population's financial transactions is very new and less than a human lifetime old. It's not necessary and privacy is definitely not impossible.
A future government that is analogous to Nazi Germany wants to put certain groups into a concentration camp ("sexual deviants", religious minorities, you take your pick). Better hope there isn't a CC history that shows you buying sex toys or religious items in the last 30 years.
Sure, in the western part of the world, you could think that this is paranoid, but depending on where you are in the world, and what minorities you belong to the risk is real.
Heck, even in the US with the way the SCOTUS is going, this may become relevant sooner than you'd expect.
I'd say it's already relevant. From an article last week [0], location data identifying visits to Planned Parenthood was easily purchasable. While this particular company removed that category in response to the article [1], there's nothing that would prevent other data brokers from selling the same information. The US is far, far overdue for a GDPR-style privacy law.
(Also, we need a better term than "data brokers", as that term is biased toward their legitimacy. "Digital stalkers" or "stalkers for hire" imply that the stalking occurs after the point of hire, rather than being proactively performed on everybody. "Privacy abusers" is accurate, but non-specific. I don't have a term that would encompass the omnipresent spying, the danger of a dataset's existence against future threats, and the low price they put on our privacy. Bonus points if the term could call out the false dichotomy of public vs private.)
Edit: That said, advocating for privacy is not advocating for cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are by design massively inefficient, in the same way that a low-trust society is inefficient, and somehow touts that as a virtue.
> But unless that merchant is very specific, the card company doesn't know what I've bought.
But the merchant knows and (unless it's a very old mom & pop shop), they didn't do it manually, the itemized receipt is in their computer system. Which the government can easily obtain and correlate with the credit card transaction so now they have both.
As the downstream comments say, if you're any kind of persecuted minority, this is a big problem.
They might not do anything nefarious and simply get hacked and now the whole world knows all your purchases, would that also be fine? I'm not saying this as if crypto solves it, because it doesn't, but that's one possible risk of someone having access to all your purchase history in one place.
The main real world problem is when your business isn’t able to use the credit card system. Adult/nsfw services and weed stores are the obvious examples. But I can imagine many more coming up over time.
I've been using credit cards online for decades and I am yet to encounter anything negative from doing so. I get that my credit card provider knows that I'm buying £X of goods from merchant Y. But unless that merchant is very specific, the card company doesn't know what I've bought.
And, if it did... so what? Perhaps I'm naive, but even if I was hiding (for example) my sexuality - what's the CC company going to do? Try to upsell me a rainbow themed card?
I try to take my privacy seriously, and I don't particularly want my interactions monitored and mined. But what are the actual, non-theoretical problems that this causes?