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Comment by ilove_banh_mi | Hacker News Reader

I 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?

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That'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.)

Buy 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.

Or 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.

How do I pay with cash on amazon.com?

You can buy Amazon gift cards with cash anywhere like drug and grocery stores.

However, 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.

> If you have an account, or even a consistent shipping address, Amazon knows what you're buying.

Still a huge difference betwen that and the alternative where all three of:

- Amazon - Google - and MasterCard

knows what you've bought IMO.

This makes me wonder if there is a business model for 'anonymous proxy' companies, where you do the shopping at your favourite online webshops, but handle actual ordering, payment and final delivery to your home via the proxy company, who guarantee your privacy for a small additional fee, or subscription charge.

Maybe this exists already. The difficulty would be in offering a good usability (how do you get that Amazon product you want in your local shopping basket).

That business would attract all the bad actors looking to use stolen credit cards and then get banned by the merchant processors for too many chargebacks. And no one can guarantee your privacy, unless they're deleting data very quickly, but the merchant processors wouldn't like that nor would the government.

It would have the same due-dilligence requirements as any webshop and validate your payment method (which could be any method, like iDeal, and even credit card, where the payment processor doesn't get to see the exact order details, but a 'proxied order').

You are right about the privacy guarantee, but there is the issue of trust in any business transaction. Why am I using ProtonMail/VPN? Because they have privacy + security as their primary USP and it is reflected in their business (transparency, privacy policies, compliance, certification, etc.). They work hard to earn and keep my trust, and I pay them to do just that.

I am no expert but probably you can let your company be audited by some trusted party on adherence to privacy promises and prove that you comply.

Having that they can keep my data in storage for as long my government requires by law.

Edit: Because this is deeply nested and tangential to the topic I created a separate Ask HN on this idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17884474

Wouldn't that company have all your information? What would make me trust them? Seems more dangerous than buying directly from multiple retailers, for example.

See my response to lotsofpulp.

Amazon Locker storage boxes can be used without any address and with a pseudonym as your Amazon account. You receive a six digit code to pick up your stuff. Only works for items that are fulfilled by Amazon, though.

Well don't use amazon dot com then.

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=14583169011

This is the first Google result for “amazon.com pay with cash”.

Thats pretty backwards. Just make it illegal for banks to sell customer data. No need to make life miserable for everyone.

Pull money out at an ATM and pay for things with cash I guess. Not great, but it's an option.

Do 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?

Gift cards can be purchased with cash.

As 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.

I 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.

The 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.

Care to tell your story because that is totally fucked up if a cop took a measly $800 in cash from you?

You don't read much about police abuse of power, huh.

In Philadelphia, most cash seizures are under $250.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/10/how-p...

There is no legal restriction of how much money you can carry around with you in the US, I believe. When you cross a national border you need to declare it and if you buy casino chips or deposit into a bank, they will report you to the government. But the cops can and often do "arrest" the money and will take much smaller amounts of money from you if they find it.

As long as this is possible. In China's social credit experiments cash money is no longer an option, and in countries such as Sweden they are thinking of getting rid of cash too (though public opinion has shifted somewhat with growing awareness of privacy issues).

On the other hand, most credit cards already sell transaction data to third parties.

Hey 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.

Cash?

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