[lifeisstillgood]

Walmart probably has more actionable data - from those purchases of condoms by a married man who did not last year, to the purchases of pregnancy tests of the woman who curiously appears just after him at the till register on lunchtimes.

Add in the bottles of wine and the alka seltzer the day after, the purchase of womans underwear in sizes too big for his wife but the same size as his boxers, and the bra that won't fit his girlfriend but will fit has 42" shirt size

there is a lot out there that is not parseable from photos even with gis data embedded

why do you think fb wants us to "share" our shopping data

[just2n]

You can purchase things at Walmart with cash. It's pretty much impossible to track purchases made with cash. You can't pay with an anonymous money source on the internet, and you can't obtain that much anonymity on Facebook.

[lifeisstillgood]

You can choose to pay with cash. You can choose to not surf with cookies or use Facebook.

You can choose not to buy, with cash or not, trackable devices like cameras, phones, video games

But people do not choose these things en mass

The issue lies in how we regulate - I believe any form of tracking or surveillance on or offline should be required to produce raw near real time feeds. There is no reasonable way we can regulate without knowing what is being collected - and becoming outraged by it's collection.

Either these should be restricted by identifiable people or published if unidentifiable.

I want my purchase history from wal mart

[bad_user]

If you can't wear some kind of mask a store could use face recognition for tracking customers. And I predict stores from the UK will start doing just that.

Yes you can pay with cash, but you have to be physically there to do that and until we'll be able to make anonymous payments on the Internet, nothing can guarantee that you are anonymous.

[w1ntermute]

Uh, are you kidding me? If I'm ever buying anything questionable at Walmart, I just use cash. I usually buy condoms from Walmart, and I always use cash (and no, I'm not cheating on my girl). You're not thinking this through.

[lifeisstillgood]

The point I was making was that with electronic transactions, discovering or infering information about a person from their purchases has just as much value as say working out someon is gay from their friends list or choice of netflix.

Use cash. But be aware it is slowly but surely becoming a ghetto.

[w1ntermute]

> Use cash. But be aware it is slowly but surely becoming a ghetto.

How exactly is it becoming a "ghetto"? I have never seen any retail stores or restaurants refuse to take cash. In fact, the only place where I've encountered that issue is for buying gas. In big cities, like NYC, there are still restaurants where they only take cash.