> We collect your personal information from technology we use in and outside of our stores. For example, our point-of-sale terminals process your credit card information when you complete your purchase [...]
Which is pretty obvious. Nothing about them explicitly tracking in-store purchase history via credit card numbers, which as above, they certainly do and allow you to disable in your account settings.
As another example, southern grocer H-E-B is famous for not having loyalty cards and tracking in-store customer behaviors via credit card number, regardless of whether you have an HEB.com account. They then sell that data to vendors. [0]
This NYT article from several years ago verifies that Target ties all credit card purchases to a unique "guest ID". [1]
Can you cite the US federal regulation or Visa/Mastercard TOS that prohibits tracking customer purchase behavior by credit card number without consent? There may be state or local statutes I'm unaware of, but I'm confident there's nothing on a country-wide level.
You are absolutely correct that Apple Pay and Android Pay do not allow tracking in this manner due to anonymous tokenizing. But that's nothing new - going back to the subject of the article, tracking generally isn't possible with cash transactions as well.
[0] https://www.pmidpi.com/blog/newsletter/h-e-b-releasing-custo...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....