There's a general reaction that big government is bad, more tracking is bad. Norway ranks highly in most metrics of development and quality of life. Perhaps in a high trust society this type of data collection is a positive.
Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
81–90 of 498 posts
Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or to tax you more efficiently.
Isn’t that just what sales tax is for? Another comment mentioned increasing your tax bracket if you bought too much meat, but trivially they could just add a sales tax on meat instead to the same effect.
With this they can make a progressive sales tax. "Oh, if you buy meat according to the national average, you pay the standard tax. But if you are eating more than that, you pay double."
Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ostensibly... But if you ever pay with a card, it's quite likely those with the data will be able to correlate your cash purchases with the card purchase and thus identify you.
How? Unless you input a form of ID (like a telephone number in a loyalty program) I don't see how a cash transaction can be linked to you at all. It's not like your cash purchase of 58.32kr has a match 578.32 kr withdrawal; that cash was taken from an ATM in a large, round-number bundle.
If there's a cash transaction every Wednesday between 7pm and 9pm, which always contains a specific type of bread, and a specific type of breakfast cereal, and a specific type of milk, and a specific type of sandwich filling, that's anonymous customer #5678.
If you ever misremember the amount cash in your wallet, and, rather than just abandoning your basket at the checkout when you discover this, you pay with a card just one time, for that exact basket, when there is no cash customer for that basket on that night, they can now be pretty certain about who customer #5678 is, and can then link you to 95% of your historic purchases too.
OpSec is hard, yo.
Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
#84"SSB claims they want a less time-consuming way of collecting and analysing household consumption statistics in order to inform tax policy, social assistance and child allowance." Aka the more we know about you, the more efficiently we can create policies to control your behavior to our liking.
Well, since we sat on our collective asses and blamed the consumer while corporates were building mass survaliance, we should not be surprised that the state is joining the party.
Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
#85“Hello #3576. You have reached your 1kg monthly limit of natural meat. Please consult the official list for alternatives.”
Doing stuff like this today is going to be 100x better than what people 3 generations from now will have to live through thanks to climate change. The question is whether we’re willing to inconvenience ourselves today to protect future generations - and the answer is looking like no.
Given that since 2020 we observed that (at least in the US) many were not even prepared to accept minor inconvenience to protect the _current_ generations, I’d say the answer is emphatically “hell no” rather than just looking like it.
Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t that just what sales tax is for? Another comment mentioned increasing your tax bracket if you bought too much meat, but trivially they could just add a sales tax on meat instead to the same effect.
With this they can make a progressive sales tax. "Oh, if you buy meat according to the national average, you pay the standard tax. But if you are eating more than that, you pay double."
Thanks, that’s an informative reply I hadn’t thought of
Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why explicitly link the data to people’s national ID numbers? If analyzing societal trends were the only purpose of this initiative, anonymized (or for some applications, aggregated) data would work equally well.
The article already answers this: "When the purchases are linked to a household, it will be possible in the consumption statistics to analyze socio-economic and regional differences in consumption, and link it to variables such as income, education and place of residence."
That can still be done with anonymized data. It is not necessary to associate purchasing habits with national ID numbers to perform the analyses you listed.
Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
#88Tell me again how we're not moving into technocracy, with everything micromanaged, every purchase accounted for (by the government). 'Its perfectly fine for governments to know this info'. The end of banks, and central bank digital currency and social credit systems are just around the corner.
All of what you have just said is totally correct. Will be made worse if not is already worse with closed-source software, zero privacy, internet-of-things, artificial intelligence and blockchains as I said before. [0]
Anyone standing in the way of this have failed to stop it entirely and we will end up co-existing with these things in a few years or so.
So it is not a surprise at all to see Norway do this. A new world order of CBDCs, IoT and more invasive tracking, etc led by members of the World Government Summit.
Oh dear.
Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
#89“Hello #3576. You have reached your 1kg monthly limit of natural meat. Please consult the official list for alternatives.”
Quoted post unavailable.
Why do people jump from "meat" to bugs (which are still meat btw) instead of vegetable proteins like tofu? I'd much rather eat tofu, tempeh, Quorn, etc than bugs.
Re: Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
#90"SSB claims they want a less time-consuming way of collecting and analysing household consumption statistics in order to inform tax policy, social assistance and child allowance." Aka the more we know about you, the more efficiently we can create policies to control your behavior to our liking.
You're already being tracked by the grocery stores, wouldn't it be better to be tracked by someone who at least tries to have your best interests at heart vs. the grocery industry who just wants to sell you more?