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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Because none of it is really unknown? People know about it and don't care. Hell, even people on this forum that should know better and care that don't, or think when they hear about stuff like this it's FB pixel or google analytics stuff. The simple fact is with a few basic pieces of information on somebody, there's almost nothing that is sacred or not for sale. People mistakenly believe they're protected by adblockers and stuff, or by avoiding social media, but the simple fact is that it is unavoidable while simply existing and the 1000x comment is from my POV the scale of it is astounding and growing every year and people really don't have a good understanding of the subtle and not subtle ways it can affect you, or when told, don't care/dismiss it. So I don't really feel anymore like explaining it. If more people understood, I'd also stand to profit quite a bit from it, so that's where my frustrated tone is coming from.

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I'm pretty sure it was over when we switched to debit/credit cards. Everywhere you go, how much you buy, all that stuff has been sold for quite a while now.

People voluntarily used loyalty cards well before then.

I remember when loyalty cards first came to England. There were consumer rights shows on TV devoting entire episodes to the evils of their spying.

It’s amazing how much worse things have gotten, yet how people seem to care less now than they used to.

I wonder if it’s just consumers being so overwhelmed by their lack of control that they’ve become apathetic to the problem as a whole.

Legitimate question: At this point, what could a loyalty card possibly measure that isn't already measured on a bigger scale?

The cc/bank provider already gets an itemized bill, and they get it for everywhere you shop as opposed to a single store (so a superset of this data is already collected). This is in some (most?) cases already shared with stores, and even if it isn't, what can a store do with it the bank/cc provider can't do worse.

Banks don’t know what specific items you’ve purchased from a supermarket. Just that you spent £123 at that store.

Thats where the paranoid was, around the fact that your individual shopping habits were being stored.

Also we are talking about the 90s here. So cash payments were more common.

cash is tracked as well, it's been over for a long time. each bill has a serial # and it gets scanned going in and out of the bank. Yes, it's still marginally easier to launder cash but if you just take it out of the ATM and spend it at a store it'll get tracked accurately

How would one find out what data brokers knew from their cash purchases?

Do banks sell this information? This bill was pulled from this ATM in Georgia by one Claudius McMoneyhands, and then deposited by one CashMoneyBusiness LLC in South Carolina three weeks later

Seems like there could still be intermediaries and a lack of what you actually bought with it at least?

Oh boy, don't give them any more ideas. This would work.

I suggested that this might be happening and had someone pretty quickly dismissing that the Chinese ATM maker here (oddly specifically, and happens to be my bank ATM here in Wyoming which I never stated), would put in the extra hardware for that. The hardware is mostly there already for imaging (how does the machine verify it's valid cash?) and it analyzes digits with a small neuronet for cheques (decades old tech). It's all there, just write some back-end stuff, and process bill images at a colocation if the ATMs don't have the horsepower to get the serial number locally.

I don't think this is as accurate as you are making out. Wawa (a connivence store in the Philly area) isn't tracking each $10 that goes in and out of the register. It could float all over the city before hitting a bank, and even then banks typically track serial numbers for large demonizations and we when there's a suspicion of illegal activity. Happy to learn more about this if I have it wrong.

> demonizations

denominations, perhaps?

Yes.

Grocery store lets you draw $200 cashback out of their register.

No, it was before this, with phone lines and wiretapping because forcibly allowed by law. As soon as we said "okay, you're allowed to record stuff if it's for a good purpose", it was over.

My favorite example is the story about a data broker who, the day after 9/11 happened went from the name "Muhammad" to a list of ~1K people which included 1 out of 4 of the 9/11 terrorists.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/magazine/hank-asher-data....

I really don't think they "know". They have an idea. But they really don't understand any sort of extent or implication.

If the FTC could do anything here to make this situation better, it would be to give every person access to any data about them that gets sold.

> the subtle and not subtle ways it can affect you

In Manufacturing Consent they measured column inches in the NYT-- IIRC it was something like measuring the total that support the relevant U.S. administration's official position on given policy vs. inches that went against the gov't position. In any case, they were measuring column inches.

What were you measuring to come to your conclusion?

I don't really understand the point of this comment.

Thanks for your perspective.

I'm aware that using adblockers and avoiding social media doesn't entirely prevent tracking, shadow profiles, and such, but surely it makes things more difficult for these companies, no? Or would you say that there's practically no difference between making an effort to preserve one's privacy and just giving up entirely?

I use an adblocker and have never clicked an ad in my life. I buy very little online. When I do I go straight to the website.

Does any of what you’re talking about impact my life? How?

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