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Comment by bigpeopleareold | Hacker News Reader

"Cash is anonymous" : This is a feature it seems particularly for Germans, known for their privacy laws and privacy efforts.

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No it's not. Because Payback has 30 million customers in Germany. Their whole business model is literally based around mining user data. In markets you'll see people paying with cash and then using the Payback card for the bonus points.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payback_(Bonusprogramm)

https://www.payback.net/de/ueber-payback/daten-fakten/

I wonder what GDPR does here.

Even 5 years ago, you had to agree to at least 3 pages of information about how your data is being processed.

I guess it's 10 pages now.

If you as a consumer agree to your data being processed and shared as a business model, GDPR can't really do much for you.

If they make it very difficult to say no to extra processing (more than is required for the core business) that comes very close to coercion. Once the storm of US companies not complying (and let's be honest, the big corporations are currently not compliant in the least) and being fined has died down I can't imagine the regulatory bodies will not go after this kind of behaviour.

Paying cash and using a loyalty card for your day-to-day shopping and then not using it at your local pharmacy, sex-shop or whatever is exactly the same thing as using Chrome for your day-to-day browsing and Tor Browser for looking up that weird thing on your foot, or closing your curtains when you change your clothes.

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