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Comment by agrue | Hacker News Reader

I recently made a purchase at a friend's small brick and mortar retailer using a credit card. He texted me a couple days later thanking me for the support.

Turns out the shop has a Square cash register, and for cc transactions Square provides any email addresses associated with that card, provided the customer has "opted in".

Similarly, I purchased an air compressor at Lowes a few months back. Lowes has been emailing my wife about the air compressor pretty regularly, as she used that card (mine, not joint) for some online shopping a few months prior. Good thing it wasn't a surprise for her.

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Marketing emails from Square are especially frustrating because I do want to opt into receipts via email when I make purchases using my credit card on Square registers. It’s especially convenient for my business credit card, even when I make a purchase at a new location I don’t need to manually enter the special receipts email alias to send it to my accountant, it just happens automatically at most places. But then my accountant and I also automatically get opted in to marketing emails and there’s no way to separate those two things.

This is one of the many reasons I always pay cash for things at retail. Any business that doesn't accept cash doesn't get my business.

Living in Thailand where cash is primary and often the only form of payment, it took no time to adjust to it and now that piece of mind of not having every purchase tracked is great. Yesterday I bought a monitor at the mall and they gave me a pretty nice discount and free shipping because I didn't go credit/debit. You see card usage requiring $50 minimums or buyer pays the network fee too. Herein lies a pretty big societal difference where the network fee isn't built-in and cash payers aren’t subsidizing or implicitly paying those fees for card users.

Credit cards in the US are effectively a regressive tax, because the people with good credit using cards get their fees refunded through card perks. Thailand is very good about not having regressive taxes in general. Someone making the median income doesn't pay more than about 2% tax at most.

In the US, card companies require that merchants charge the same price for both cash and credit, so there’s no incentive to avoid using cards (so the processors make more money overall on fees).

Cash handling costs for normal businesses - at least in the west - are higher than cars handling costs. The only time that changes is for companies avoiding tax or money laundering.

In Australia basically no one I know has or uses cash anymore.

It probably wasn't helped by how bulky and heavy Australian coins are coupled with how many you need to buy anything these days - but other than the coins it is sad, I don't really like having all money handled by private companies.

I purchased a table and a store, and they needed my email address to contact me about delivery.

turns out they use square, and now when I use that credit card with unrelated purchases, square will email me.

so I get email from unrelated vendors.

I contacted them to stop this - and they didn't do it. waste of time.

So I don't pay with a credit card for businesses that use square.

I'm pretty sure that's the kind of things GDPR would prevent.

Assuming it is enforced properly which it is definitely not and most likely will never be.

After GDPR was passed I've got pretty much no "legal" spam. "Unsubscribe" links in emails actually work. If they didn't - then companies sending those emails would get huge fines. The only spam that I receive now is from "Nigerian princes", but GDPR can't stop those anyway.

Counterpoint: Google and Facebook are still around and stalking users, and their malicious SDKs (as well as other analytics SDKs) still litter every mainstream app possible with no way to even opt-out (overlooking the fact that such tracking should be opt-in to begin with).

I only use cards and have never gotten an unrelated email

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