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.
For email, there's Fastmail, which is great and the web UI is clean, simple and fast. If your phone is supported, you can install LineageOS on it without any Google apps.
Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
61–70 of 294 posts
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#62I don't understand how they can correlate a sale to a specific google account without getting personal identification data. By definition if they can associate a transaction with a user, the user has been identified and has lost all privacy.
I don't actually know how to do this, so this is a bit like the "draw the rest of the owl" meme :)
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#63Privacy focused payment products will be more in demand because of these kind of things. I look forward to it !
Yeah, this is like them stepping into my house. This whole time they’ve been peering through every window but now, they’ve let themselves in.
They realized there's money laying on the floor of your house.
Why wouldn't they pick it up?
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#64I don't understand how they can correlate a sale to a specific google account without getting personal identification data. By definition if they can associate a transaction with a user, the user has been identified and has lost all privacy.
Not sure how this works specifically, but usually you step back a bit and say that what you actually want to determine is not whether a user performed a transaction, but how many users who saw a specific ad bought a product, and then you develop a (statistical) zero knowledge proof/protocol to achieve this. I don't actually know how to do this, so this is a bit like the "draw the rest of the owl" meme :)
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#65Do 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.
From the article "The company said people can opt out of ad tracking using Google’s “Web and App Activity” online console. Inside Google, multiple people raised objections that the service did not have a more obvious way for cardholders to opt out of the tracking, one of the people said."
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#66Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did read the article. That's discovering that someone is stalking you, until and unless you tell them you'd rather "opt out" even though you never "opted in" the evil stalking. Meanwhile, all shops and businesses you get near to or purchase from are calling the stalker to let him know what you're doing -- how do you "opt out" of these?
Buy less stuff. It maybe isn't an ideal solution, but it has a lot of upsides. Advertisers (and ad middlemen like Google) bet that they can sell more stuff by drilling deeper and deeper into people's lives. But the bottom falls out of all that when people decide to opt out of large parts of the commercial ecosystem. Track your finances instead, the same way you would with a fitness app, and get that dopamine hit from…
When I'm shopping it isn't just the old ladys digging deep and long in their purse for the exact change, almost everyone pays with cash.
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#68The key here is "double-blind encryption" - assuming they got that right, neither can see exactly what I am buying, so I'm good. Bigger point: I'd be ok with any company tracking my activities _as long as_ one of two conditions are met: a) it benefits me (and me only), or b) it benefits them _but_ they cannot identify me.
(b) seems to me like an expression of a naive view of personal identity that makes a binary distinction between anonymity and non-anonymity that doesn't exist in reality in any meaningful sense. Does manipulation against your interests become a non-problem when the manipulator doesn't know the name in your passport? Does it become a non-problem when the manipulator's tools are too imprecise to pick out you specifically, so they apply the same strategy to you and one other person, yielding only a 50% success rate? Does it become a non-problem when they lump you in with three other people? With four? Ten? A hundred? A million?
All of this is about power. Just because power is exercised indirectly or somewhat imprecisely doesn't make it categorically different from someone influencing specifically you, just as poisoning rivers and lakes isn't categorically different from poisoning your food on your plate. It's just a scheme for laundering the power to make it less obvious, and if you allow that, that's what people will do. People who want power don't care how they get it, all they care about is that they get it, so if you tell them that you are OK with being manipulated indirectly, then that's what they will do.
Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#69Re: Google and Mastercard Cut Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
#70Do 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.