Hacker News Reader

Comment by RandomBacon | Hacker News Reader

I pay cash for all my in-person purchases to attempt to prevent companies from data-mining my spending habits. I'll switch to cashless if it's just as private.

View on HN

I feel like the practical effect of this is that you're just subsidizing all those people that use credit cards to get frequent flyer miles. Stores raise their prices because most people use credit cards, so you're paying for that no matter what. Might as well get some frequent flyer miles.

Having said that, I'm shocked that you don't get monthly statements from your health insurance company that say "hey you bought a lot of potato chips and ice cream, pay us a dollar extra a month." It's coming, though, I'm sure.

Many stores have lower prices for cash customers, sometimes significantly, so I could just as easily say that credit card customers subsidize my lower prices. Free "miles" are nice (if you fly), but cash is always more valuable than scrip.

Offering lower prices to cash customers usually violates the agreement between the merchant and the card network.

That was never the case AFAIK. “Discount for cash” was prevalent before the rule change in January 2013 which allowed surcharges on credit card transactions.

https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/merchants/get-support/mercha...

The miles are paid from selling your data, not the processing fees. That's why higher net worth people get better rewards.

I don't think they make very much money at all from selling your info. The banks that issue credit cards make most of their money from interest and interchange charges (what the bank charges the merchant for a person using the card - varies from 0-2%)[1]. Rewards are what the pay people to use their card and they hope to make them up with the former methods.

Do you have a reference on how much they make from selling data? Do banks release such info on their annual reports?

[1]https://www.valuepenguin.com/how-do-credit-card-companies-ma...

If there was a cost to eating terrible, we would have less to lose from this virus.

Hypertension, diabetes, obesity? Aren't these all costs of eating terribly?

yes, great point. But, the bill isn't due til you're ~65+. It takes patience to think "unhealthy eating is more expensive than it appears because present-value for old-age healthcare costs aren't included".

The bill was due far before 65 for my mom who eats very unhealthy. There is a lot of daily pain and suffering caused by obesity and an increase in preventable health issues that need to be treated.

Back in 2008 or 9 or whatever, they thought they should write the ACA so that the only factors were age and smoking status.

And now there's lots of people that don't want private insurance at all (or whatever it is they mean by Medicare for all).

So apparently it's not entirely hopeless.

For me cash isn't so much about privacy (though that's nice) as about control. When you use a credit card or the like you are having a large impersonal corporation that has historically been influenced by both state actors and public opinion deciding who you can enter into transactions with.

It's a long leash but it's still a leash.

Do you really think that would ever happen in this system? That they would willingly let go of the opportunity to know everything about you?

The bigger problem is the power it gives the state, all it takes to stop you from being able to do anything in a cashless society is tapping a key.

I try to do that as much as possible. I don’t want all of my interactions and transactions to be going through many intermediate parties. I also want to keep the freedom of cash alive for those who find it difficult or impossible to get or learn to use cards and online payments.

All the grocery stores here (Colorado) put their staple foods behind loyalty-program discounts. Presumably the loyalty ID is just as good an identifier as a CC#.

I wrote a perl script to automate signing up for and downloading the bar code image for my local grocer's discount card without actually giving any name or information. I just print out a new one every month or so.

New employees occasionally get confused by the lack of a name but it's never a problem. I pay in cash, of course.

All the loyalty programs here (California) will let you provide a phone number rather than carrying a card. You should be able to use e.g. 867-5309 if you're really looking for anonymity.

There are websites that will give you a phone number for this purpose, but really what you want is a number that other people at the same store use, not a number that other people somewhere else in the country use.

At the grocery store I go to, the cashiers typically ask if you have a loyalty-program card and if you don't, they offer to swipe their own so you can get the discount. I suspect that's not allowed by their employer, but I don't see much downside as a cash-paying customer.

I really wish those loyalty cards were actually tied to my credit card. I’m tired of having to type my phone number into the system each time I buy groceries (with the same credit card).

At a lot of stores, it's pretty easy to get those without filling in the information lol. Usually they'll just hand you a form with the cards attached and ask you to fill it in online.

I have several cards like that which are not tied to anything.

Not if they want to aggregate your data with a thousand other databases.

Also, people can sign up for those with an alias, or throw away the loyalty card and get a new one on a regular basis (e.g. right after redeeming your points).

I can understand better privacy of cash when buying something uncommon. But when doing standard everyday shopping, I don't really see much point.

It's either:

1. Every day I pay with a card at the grocery store, this leaks information about my whereabouts, or

2. Every X days I withdraw cash at the ATM, this also leaks information about my whereabouts

Is there any advantage (in terms of privacy) of using cash in such scenario? The only thing that comes to my mind is that price is also leaked when using a card. But I don't see much use of this information.

Pay with cash from before the outbreak. Just say, "Keep the change".

I've been carrying enough smaller denomination bills and coins so that I can provide exact change, or say no thank you to the coins they offer in change.

The biggest hurdle is pre-paying for gasoline. I just signed up for a gasonline credit card (rather than using my main credit card as there is a much higher chance of my card getting skimmed at a pump; it happened to me a couple of times before I went cash-only).

At least with the fuel card, I will get the same discount as I did when paying cash. I also have a box of gloves in my vehicle to handle the fuel pump with.

> I'll switch to cashless if it's just as private.

If it were just as private, what would be the point?

There are pros and cons to cash and cashless. For most people in a normally functioning modern society cashless is in theory convenient "better": automatic electronic transaction record (for your own use), no making change, quicker, less physical items to carry, etc. The #1 advantage for modern cash users is privacy. Some people don't want to have all of their transactions tracked and mined by others. Not considering privacy, there isn't much cash has over cashless aside from working offline, but again, normally functioning modern society.

My favorite thing about using Apple pay is I don't have to touch anything (most of the time, anyway). I just double tap my watch and hold it near the card reader and that's it.

Having that convenience is super nice right now!

What do you mean? Then you could pay for stuff privately over the internet.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a first amendment case over this -- maybe because of the continued existence of cash as an alternative?

What business is it of the government what books I read?

It's more like the banks and payment companies. Your data is monetizable, so the people who create cashless systems have a strong incentive to make them less private than cash, in order to increase their revenues.

Most payment systems allow the "bank" to make money in various ways. Either you've deposited some money and they get to collect interest on it for the time between then and when you withdraw it (like checking accounts), or they get a percentage of transactions (like credit cards), or the system is one where the tokens expire after a period of time (like gift cards) and some of them go unspent which allows them to keep the money etc.

A system can be private and be funded in any of those ways. The incentive to provide privacy is that it allows them to out-compete other payment systems without privacy, and then they get more deposits/transactions/unclaimed funds.

The primary reason this doesn't exist isn't that companies wouldn't provide it, it's that there are various laws that effectively prohibit transaction processing systems that provide meaningful cryptographic privacy guarantees.

This is where a lot of people had hope for blockchain -- most of those laws apply to the payment processor and it doesn't inherently require any payment processor entity for them to apply to. But with that comes a lot of other disadvantages (limited transaction volume, wasteful energy consumption, lack of a controlling party to provide up-front resources to address early user experience issues), not to mention the speculation-inducing deflationary nonsense, which would have to be overcome before it could expect to become popular with ordinary people.

Enough of those might eventually be addressed enough to make such systems enter common usage, but we would obviously be better off to do something about the laws prohibiting cryptographically private payment processing systems using ordinary payment processors instead of forcing people onto these ugly workarounds for something everybody should have a right to anyway. It's still not any of the government's business what books I read.

You can save between 1% to 5% on everything if you use credit cards. Maybe your "privacy" is worth it.

Absolutely not. I gues I'm one of those weirdos that want privacy and to be able to pay the money that I earned for things without being tracked.

They re-coup this by overcharging businesses as well as having some VERY valuable data. I don't want to play the stupid credit card game either and try to guess which card I should get to get the most "deals".

All I want is a convenient way to pay that doesn't invade privacy. The only two payment methods that satisfy this that I know of are cash and cryptocurrency. I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency for many reasons so cash is my only option.

I can understand your point of view, but personally I don't care if credit card companies know what stores I go to, what I'm buying and if they sell that data. I get targeted marketing, some extra junk mail, in return for a 1 to 5% discount.

In the unlikely event I find the need for an illicit purchase, I'll use cash.

> In the unlikely event I find the need for an illicit purchase, I'll use cash.

You seem to be alluding to the "I have nothing to hide argument". Just because you think you have nothing to hide, doesn't mean you do. Things you don't think you need to hide now may become things you wish to hide in the future. Just because you "have nothing to hide" doesn't mean that you're not entitled to privacy. Would you want me looking through your transaction history?

You are correct, there is no doubt. I just don't see this as likely enough to happen, so I take the convenience of using credit cards and the benefit of credit card points / free stuff.

I would not want my detailed transaction history being public, but am okay with it being used for targeting in a pseudo-anonymized way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com