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Physical stores can be (used to be) big vending machines. They accept cash and give receipts as a proof of purchase and can (usually) be found in the event of issues. They're probably recording you on camera in case you steal or use counterfeit money, but vending machines probably are too.

I think the real problem is doing the same thing at a distance. At a store you know where to find the entity you purchase from in case of issues and you get a receipt at the same time you purchase. You can sort of get the same thing with an individual face-to-face, but only if there is an established trust in some form (buyer has to trust they can find the seller if something goes wrong, seller has to trust buyer isn't using counterfeit money, etc). It's pretty hard to trade at a distance without revealing something about your self. At the very least, there's going to be a middle man that will want to know something (a lot) about you if they're going to provide you services (P.O. Box, shipping company, etc). They want to make sure customers stay honest so they don't get in trouble when customers scam each other or make an illegal trade.

It all comes down to trust. I think all the retailers, on and off line, are blatantly violating that trust when they sell our data off, but not enough people seem to care or have a better alternative, so there are no consequences for retailers. New law is usually the last thing I want to see, but it seem to the only way to introduce a consequence for sellers at this point.

> But we haven't figured out a way to scale the vending machine model yet,

Haha sure we have, it just isn't as profitable as the current solutions which are to collect as much data as you can and use that information secondary income such as selling to marketers or using for "analytics" or "targeting"

Service builders just have to care about designing their systems like this. Every single person in this thread who works with or for one of these information collecting companies is responsible for the current state of the world.

> If someone paid $1500 for their laptop, however, they're going to want that convenience of being able to prove they purchased the laptop from XX retailer and be compensated if the thing is a lemon.

That can easily be solved. Either by using GNU Taler as Stallman describes, or by issueing cryptographic receipts of a purchase, whereby the vendor digitall signs the receipt so they can recognize it later if presented, but internally they just don't store a record of that transaction, or they don't store any information about who purchased that.

It's not a hard problem to just not store personally identifiable information, you just don't store it.

What is a hard problem is convincing people in these industries that they should care, that they should protect user privacy by not collecting the information in the first place.

>A vending machine doesn't make notes of who buys its products. A vending machine doesn't keep logs of its transactions or of the payment methods used.

Well technically the vending machine itself doesn't note this, but I've increasingly seen vending machines which accept credit cards. Thus your CC issuer knows where you were, when you were there, and can even make some inferences about what was bought based on the price.

Personally, I keep an "entertainment" budget which I withdraw in cash, both for privacy reasons AND budget reasons. (Staring down into your wallet at cold hard cash makes you hesitate before buying that cup of coffee or other sundry)

How close is Apple Pay? Is there anything in an Apple Pay transaction identifying the customer (that can be correlated across purchases)?

I've heard good things but I have no idea about the details.

Edit: https://www.engadget.com/2014/10/02/apple-pay-an-in-depth-lo...

merchant sees NO account information but has the final four digits of the PAN [CC number] as an account identifier to use as a mechanism for tracking volume/activity per account

Like another comment mentioned, no matter how secure Apple Pay is, any sort of anonymity is easy defeated by having a video camera pointed at your face.

You can prove that you purchased something by having a receipt. It can be as simple as a unique purchase number. If you pay by some cryptocurrency, you can even prove you own the sending address.

True but cryptocurrency is not particularly anonymous once you're buying physical goods that need to be shipped to an individual. Imagine how useful the blockchain would be to Amazon if they knew the addresses of all their customers wallets (which they would surely collect) and the addresses of all their competitors wallets. They could see where their customers shop and micro-target deals.

I like the GNU Taler model mentioned in the article where the payer decides whether they want to be identified, but the payee is always identifiable. Combine this with a crypto-signed receipt from the payee and you have a system that better respects privacy.

Problem is that vending machines don’t scale. Consider that much of the “tracking” on a site like Amazon.com are to overcome the inherent problems of finding products in such a massive catalog.

Maybe it is just my experience, but individual tracking (which is the sort of tracking under consideration here) does not seem to help, let alone be necessary. I do not think I have ever found something of interest in things that have been pushed at me, and the only thing that helps navigating a massive catalog is more extensive-in-scope and discriminating search capabilities.

To add to this, what if the vending machine was able to dispense 1000 things? And let's say that you are diabetic? Wouldn't it be nice if the sugar-free treats were easy for you to find? And the organic stuff easier for those seeking them to find? Etc. etc.

Somewhere there must be an intelligent balance.

That's an argument for good search and discoverability - a sugar-free aisle.

Amazon could be that machine, if we could rely on them to (at the customer's option) properly delete the customer's credit card number and delivery address when the package is delivered.

> Somewhere there must be an intelligent balance

In practice though this is mostly biased towards the revenue of the company selling the goods, not towards your health requirements.

It's in the interests of the company to align those however - so these don't conflict. If your customer is healthier and lives longer because of your service, that is beneficial to both of you.

Good health of the customers benefits competitors too, so it's a type of commons. By the Tragedy of the Commons, it's in the company's interests to damage the health of their customers for short term profit. If they don't then a competitor will.

How did diabetics even manage to buy sugar-free snacks before Amazon's recommendation engine?

Thank god for Amazon profiling them, they must have been starving before.

It sounds like you are describing the problem of trust. In a vending machine, you trust the brands to deliver a standardized product. You know what you are buying ahead of time with no doubt at all. the cost is also low enough that you trust the delivery mechanism within a given level of risk tolerance. Finally, you don't expect the product to last, it is a consumable by nature, so no relationship needs to exist - your relationship is with the brand, not the individual can of soda. If you choose to give the soda away, the person you gave it do also knows what they are getting, and the brand doesn't care who drinks the soda.

To take your laptop example, though, you may trust the brand, but, you expect it to last. therefore, your relationship is with the brand AND the product. You will need to service that laptop, and they, as the vendor will need to set parameters around what services they will and will not provide in which circumstances. They have a kind of "contract" with you that doesn't necessarily extend beyond you. In fact, there are some situations with a laptop where giving it away to the wrong person could be a crime.

My only question is: if we could "solve" this problem, would we actually want to? Do we really want to make every interaction we have into some kind of transaction, with no obligations beyond payment for goods? I don't think so. I think most of our consumer protection laws have been developed to protect consumers from the considerable costs that such a system will create - warranties, lemon laws, etc. Critically, all aimed at improving the amount of trust between brands and consumers.

Instead, I think we probably need to more carefully define what kind of trust is required, and what the covenants of brand/consumer trust actually include regarding data. GDPR is an admirable model, and probably a step in the right direction, but certainly not a perfect effort.

I'm sorry, but you are unfortunately wrong. Some colleagues are involved in the development of a vending machine that does all those nasty things. And I think there are similar products already deployed.

I think the point is that a vending machine doesn't need to do all those things to fulfill its purpose. Dollar goes in, soda comes out. Yes you can make a vending machine do that, but that's not the point.

What is the purpose of the vending machine, from the consumer point of view?

Is its purpose to provide an oasis of snacky goodness to those who happen to encounter it while passing through? If so, then yes, all it needs is dollar in, item out.

I'd argue, though, that vending machines that are in places where they are regularly encountered by the same people over and over again, such as vending machine in office buildings, dorms, schools, and such have a higher purpose.

They are to provide those who live or work near them a snack safe space. A place they can count on to take a quick break from their work day and find their favorite snacks.

A vending machine that could keep track of regular customers and their snacking habits could better fulfill that purpose. For instance, suppose Carol from accounting only ever buys Tab, and the machine is running low on Tab. Dave from marketing likes Dr. Pepper best, with Pepsi a close second, and only rarely buys anything else.

Dave tries to buy the last Tab (perhaps by mistake). The smart vending machine could recognize that it would be better to reserve the last Tab for Carol, and could tell Dave, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't vend that to you. Would you like a Dr. Pepper or Pepsi instead?".

The future didn't give us the flying cars and jetpacks we were promised, but at least it can give Carol from accounting a reliable Tab supply at work.

>They are to provide those who live or work near them a snack safe space.

>"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't vend that to you. Would you like a Dr. Pepper or Pepsi instead?"

I realise this was humour, but you framed the problem as I see it perfectly. I don't feel safe if I don't know Hal's code, especially if he's talking to all the other Hal's (be they other vending machines or information aggregating corporations). And what are the odds that these things will be open source?

Nice idea, but you just created the echo chamber of soda pop, that gently restrains you within your existing habits. Substitute [liberal-slanted article] for Tab and [conservative-slanted article] for Dr. Pepper, and we've now invented the Facebook newsfeed.

Maybe Dave and Carol need to try some new soda flavors once in a while!

The vending machine would be a more equitable host by telling Dave that it was saving the last Tab for Carol, and offer the alternatives. Dave could accept or decline. Maybe Dave wants the Tab because he's fetching it for Carole.

But that would be revealing personal information; some customers would consider it creepy, and possibly even sue.

You could call it the Nutrimatic. Share and enjoy!