> Do you believe people have a right to privacy in their financial transactions?
Not really, no. Private financial transactions are of extremely limited usefulness to regular people, and are massively, overwhelmingly useful to criminals, and allowing them causes real, societal harm.
That you can say this make me think that we are using different definitions.
Have they also stopped buying real-world credit card usage and correlating it with your other actions?
> To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person.
That doesn't really make it much better, in my opinion.
> They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme.
I never thought they did sell raw data. Having strong internal controls is wonderful, but a bit beside the point in my criticism. I object to the collection. How the data is handled post-collection is a separate issue.
>Technically the complete list of things you have purchased is a record of interactions with your bank, but I think it's incredibly privacy violating for a bank to sell infomation about what products I buy.
Isn't it in almost every bank's ToS that they are not only allowed to do this, but expected to do this?
TBH, I wouldn't be surprised to hear about Intuit selling my financial data, either.
> You are invalidly generalizing. I try to eliminate all contact I have with the tech giants, and I do not have a credit card, I am at a privacy respecting bank (GLS Gemeinschaftsbank), and I use cash.
You do you, but I'm happy to get free airline tickets and other perks from using my credit card at the expense of....... having someone else know I bought a mechanical keyboard last month?
I respect your choice but I honestly do not understand why people go to such great lengths to hide mundane data. I'll tell you the color of my underwear for free, I don't care.
Give me a break. You use credit or debit cards, they record everything. You go around the internet showing your presence to all the data brokers.
This has nothing to do with Walmart. You'd just for the first time realized that the things you say you care about don't really match up with your actions, and now you're surprised.
> I have never payed more than say $3k in cash. It just doesn’t make sense to do so.
Let me quote someone smart on privacy topic:
> Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Cash = privacy.
I dont want to get stripped from privacy by anyone for any reason.
> Is this arguing both for and against the need for financial privacy at the same time?
No.
It's a perfectly reasonable position to take. I want my transactions to be private to the world but it's reasonable that law enforcement has a method to investigate criminal behavior.
> "But that's completely the opposite of privacy."
Agreed. Privacy is my RFID credit cards not being scanned. Amazon would then hold my user data and sell it to whoever... Which they would also do via my credit card.
> assuming that privacy = breaking the law is something you are foisting on, and is in poor form.
What privacy do you have that isn't subject to the law? Outside of your own brain, can't literally everything be subject to a legal order to gain access?
It seems to me that your definition of absolute privacy is extreme, extremely specific to you, and renders the word essentially meaningless; This does of course make it very easy to argue in bad faith and rant about companies that you don't like.
> Most people don't do anything worth privacy protecting.
This is blatantly wrong, If i'm a large corporation i can use the information you think is worthless against you via first degree price discrimination and countless other targetted mechanisms. You simply haven't thought about it enough, and as soon as you do, you will realize when no privacy exists people will and have been developing mechanisms to take advantage and capitalize on this state of affairs.
> In a world where companies feel the need to track every part of my life with or without my permission. This is something I can't escape, as every time I interact with someone that does use one of these platforms than they are able to collect data on me.
I find this attitude honestly kind of confusing. I mean, you know that the shops you go to know what products you're buying from them, right? Presumably those shops look at that data in aggregate when thinking about which products to stock. How is this any different? If you're transacting with someone, it's not possible to hide that transaction from them.
> I am generally a very privacy-minded person, but serious question here: is there any legitimate use case for financial privacy from the authorities? I don’t mean “ideologically, I am upset that the government can see I buy too many pastries”.
And the vast majority of people have very little to gain from all other kinds of privacy. The government wouldn't find anything interesting in my IM messages either.
Most people who really need it are probably up to no good too.
I'm on both sides of this debate. I think most privacy issues are overblown by a small set of zealots. But at the same time I don't see much difference between financial privacy and whichever other kind.
Spying on everywhere you shop no matter which bank issues your card has no privacy implications at all?
Sorry, but at this point I can't take you seriously.
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