[madez]

> I'm confused by the lengths people have gone through to "protect" themselves from internet giants while freely giving away their info to credit card companies, traditional retailers, small businesses.

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.

Additionally, by sharing your data with a company, you give that company power over yourself and others by enabling them with the knowledge they have over you. Considering this, it is less problematic to give access to data to a small company compared to a tech giant.

[airstrike]

> 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.

[darkwater]

Maybe at the expense of buying that mechanical keyboard you thought you really wanted but actually you ended up purchasing because of continued, subtle advertising?

[skybrian]

Assuming you have the income to support your spending habits, I don't see this as much of a risk? Occasionally buying the wrong thing for whatever mistaken reason is a fact of life. Live and learn.

I would be more worried about scams, bad investments, bigger purchases, or a pattern of impulse buying.

[Marsymars]

> 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?

That's not why you're getting free airline tickets. You're getting them because you're a) subsidized by people who carry a balance and b) pay higher prices on goods to make up for the merchant fees, while being partially subsidized by those people who pay with cash and aren't getting free flights.

[madez]

I'm not hiding, I'm just not exposing myself. It's a matter of perspective.

More significantly, you are understating and trivializing the kind of information that many services force us to expose. If you share your buying history, that may reveal locations, your movements, your schedule, etc. What a set of data reveals is not up to the one the data is from, but the one analyzing it. For you it is mundande, for them it is enough.