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Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

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Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

#21

Do I have a choice, other than cancelling all of my MasterCard cards? This business of tracking and profiling is increasingly evil. If I dystopically discovered that someone has been following me around all the time, writing down everything I look at or do or purchase, in public and at home, I could not tolerate it.

[deleted]

Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you unGoogle? They have my phone, my email. Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. I doubt Visa and Amex are far behind, it's free money for them so there is no point in canning Master. What a disaster! Ad supported Internet is the root of the problem.

re: Whole Foods, I've never heard of a place that was a food desert but for Whole Foods. You should take your business somewhere else if you don't want Amazon to have data on your grocery purchases.

Funny anecdote, my fiance used to live in midtown Detroit near the Whole Foods. At the time the groceries situation was worse, it was more-or-less a food desert other than that Whole Foods [0].

I don't know how folks who can't afford a car would get groceries (an hour round trip on the bus, I guess), but that can be said about nearly everything in Michigan. The whole wealth bootstrapping problem is really unsolved out there, you can't get started on anything without like $5k for a car and car-related expenses.

[0]: https://www.google.com/maps/search/midtown+detroit+groceries...

Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

#24
They've been doing variations of spend track as a $value to goods and services for years (I mean the banks) so.. I don't get it: whats significantly different this time, compared to the spend tracking they've done as business-intelligence for the last 20 years? They sell it to the highest targetted bidder. If you are buying BMW accessories for an old model car, without searching online, dont be surprised if you get ads for mercedes cars with a BMW buy-back: your postcode or ZIPcode, plus a few other details gets "you" as well as fingerprinting web purchase: remember your card is used in a weighted centroid centered on your home...

Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

#25

Do I have a choice, other than cancelling all of my MasterCard cards? This business of tracking and profiling is increasingly evil. If I dystopically discovered that someone has been following me around all the time, writing down everything I look at or do or purchase, in public and at home, I could not tolerate it.

The only choice is to lobby your government officials to create laws preventing this sort of data collection.

End-users have zero power anymore except by collective action in the form of government regulations.

Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

#26

Do I have a choice, other than cancelling all of my MasterCard cards? This business of tracking and profiling is increasingly evil. If I dystopically discovered that someone has been following me around all the time, writing down everything I look at or do or purchase, in public and at home, I could not tolerate it.

How do you unGoogle? They have my phone, my email. Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. I doubt Visa and Amex are far behind, it's free money for them so there is no point in canning Master. What a disaster! Ad supported Internet is the root of the problem.

You can use ios or lineageos. You can use an email such as protonmail (although I personally find them just a touch shady, they're no doubt miles better than gmail) or host your own. Don't shop at whole foods. Pay with cash.

Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

#27

Do I have a choice, other than cancelling all of my MasterCard cards? This business of tracking and profiling is increasingly evil. If I dystopically discovered that someone has been following me around all the time, writing down everything I look at or do or purchase, in public and at home, I could not tolerate it.

How do you unGoogle? They have my phone, my email. Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. I doubt Visa and Amex are far behind, it's free money for them so there is no point in canning Master. What a disaster! Ad supported Internet is the root of the problem.

You could move to Apple and use Apple Pay Cash to buy purchases you'd rather not be tracked and sold to Google (and a million other companies).

Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

#28
post #25

Do I have a choice, other than cancelling all of my MasterCard cards? This business of tracking and profiling is increasingly evil. If I dystopically discovered that someone has been following me around all the time, writing down everything I look at or do or purchase, in public and at home, I could not tolerate it.

The only choice is to lobby your government officials to create laws preventing this sort of data collection. End-users have zero power anymore except by collective action in the form of government regulations.

My favorite is tracing back the problems to Larry/Sergey, which is why I wrote the essay.

Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you unGoogle? They have my phone, my email. Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. I doubt Visa and Amex are far behind, it's free money for them so there is no point in canning Master. What a disaster! Ad supported Internet is the root of the problem.

You could move to Apple and use Apple Pay Cash to buy purchases you'd rather not be tracked and sold to Google (and a million other companies).

[correction: Apple Pay Cash should indeed be a workable shield.] Using Apple Pay [not the "Cash" feature] only hides your details from the retailer, not from the credit card company nor evidently from Google.

Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

#30

Do I have a choice, other than cancelling all of my MasterCard cards? This business of tracking and profiling is increasingly evil. If I dystopically discovered that someone has been following me around all the time, writing down everything I look at or do or purchase, in public and at home, I could not tolerate it.

What a flawed analogy. This isn’t anything close to stalking. You are using a credit card processing service. If you don’t like what they do with your data, use a different one or just pay everything with cash.
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