[steadyready]

Man, I swear sometimes I feel like I’m on a forum full of wanted criminals, state actors, and/or felons.

I’m not saying I’m against privacy. I am all for not being tracked, but we are approaching absurdity.

I really want to see all of you who praise “privacy” go fully offline and use only cash. No cards. No bank account. Nothing. Salary? Cash, because earnings could also be sold and used for advertising. Groceries? Cash. Gas? Cash. No checks also, as they can be tracked /s Also, while we are at it, no Android, no iOS, no Windows or Macs. Only Linux, because we can’t trust UE vendors.

Really, maybe we should start spending our energy in convincing legislators that PII should not be sold along with transaction data/histories. Matter a fact, let’s rally for universal privacy laws. How about that?

Let’s not go 50 back in evolution just because “visa bad”. I’m happy not to lose cash or reach for my wallet anymore.

[glial]

Agreed. I'm all for privacy too. But trying to solve social problems with technical solutions seems optimistic at best. Even if everyone on this website uses cash only, the issue of data privacy still exists for the other 99.999% of society - and we should try to solve it for them too.

[Santosh83]

Cash decentralises power to the extent possible. E-currency centralises it to an absurd degree. That's the point. The slope of convenience though is gradual and slippery indeed. Institutions we've had for centuries crumbling in a matter of decades is a matter of concern. They worked more or less. There is no guarantee what is replacing them will work but we seem to have blind faith they will, since we're throwing the baby & the bathwater very gleefully out the window.

[steadyready]

I never said “remove cash”. It should continue to exist nevertheless, because it’s a level of system redundancy and backup. I just said that I shouldn’t have to sacrifice quality of life improvements and STILL have my PII data sold from other channels.

[tinus_hn]

How do you go from ‘Apple is offering a new payment method’ to a rant about how you don’t care about privacy?

Why would people have to choose between using only cash and sharing their data with everyone? The normal thing to do is limit who can access the data as much as possible. And if people don’t do that, why would legislators care?

[steadyready]

> "How do you go from ‘Apple is offering a new payment method’ to a rant about how you don’t care about privacy?"

Because some other people started ranting about cashless payments, payment processors and their privacy.

> "Why would people have to choose between using only cash and sharing their data with everyone?"

Because that's how other people put it. I was just raising the point that we shouldn't have to give up QoL improvements, instead push for more privacy-focused laws, like limiting PII-data being sold along with transaction histories.

[tinus_hn]

Apart from your comment and its replies there’s only one other conversation containing the word ‘privacy’ and its about how people want to be able to use cash so the credit card company can’t see all of your purchases. Doesn’t sound too unreasonable to me (nor does that appear to me to be limiting you in any way) and I don’t quite understand why you didn’t reply to them instead of posting an apparently ‘opposite’ rant.

[dheera]

Convenience and privacy are NOT mutually exclusive, the details are in the implementation.

[steadyready]

Not 100%, but we can outlaw PII selling, and therefor everybody wins. I get “peace of mind” knowing IKEA doesn’t get targeted information, and IKEA still gets some level of anonymous demographic data from advertisers.

[throwaway44432]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30260987