[lrvick]

When you use tap to pay, you are sending information about your purchases and location to dozens of ad tech companies, and are still participating in the very surveillance capitalism that makes everyone stupider for money.

I also pay with cash for privacy, and to use my privilege to constantly demand it as an option so the unbanked who cannot advocate for themselves can still participate in society.

[jodrellblank]

> I also pay with cash for privacy

Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you. And when the shop pays those notes into the bank, they will be connected to the shop's account. "lrvick took this note out November 4th on Main Street, Pretend Grocery Store on West Street paid it in on November 7th". Maybe the note will be given in change and pass through a few places, but over months and years, you and Pretend Groceries will be more and more strongly connected.

"Yesterday Dad went out to buy a hardcover novel. He said he wanted to read something long, rich and thought provoking for a change. He also said he was going to buy the book with cash, so nobody could trace the purchase to him and exploit his interests for commercial purposes" - Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson, December 1993.

https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/d0f4d450df96013172...

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/12/07

[lrvick]

> Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you.

For large bills that is true to some extent, but having worked closely with secret service in the past at multiple points, they have confirmed my suspicion that $20s and below are virtually impossible to track and they do not bother unless they are specifically giving you marked bills because you are already suspected of a crime.

Also avoiding tracking by a governments and tracking by surveillance capitalism are very different threat models.

Getting down to 0 tracking is of course impossible, but the less data we leak the less clear of a picture third parties get on how to predict and manipulate our behavior. Why help them?

[jodrellblank]

Why would it be virtually impossible for a bank to put an OCR camera on a bill counting machine?

I didn’t mean the state tracking you, I meant the bank doing it so they can sell the data behind the scenes for the usual marketing reasons.

[lrvick]

A bank knowing what bills were issued at an ATM is not the same thing as someone being able to tell which vending machine I put it into with good cross indexing to know which bill purchased which thing, as is the case with centralized credit card networks.

[tharne]

> I also pay with cash for privacy, and to use my privilege to constantly demand it as an option so the unbanked who cannot advocate for themselves can still participate in society.

Good for you! I so wish more people would think and act this way. Most people don't realize that in a world without cash, government and large businesses can shutdown your entire with the push of a button without any sort of due process.

[rpdillon]

Absolutely agree. It just has nothing to do with self-reported memory and cognitive decline, which is the subject of the article.

[lrvick]

I think it is totally related. The more information you give surveillance capitalists about what you buy at the drug store, or liqueur store, or movie theater, when you leave home, etc. the more power you give them to manipulate you and keep you addicted to their platforms.

As a former professional magician with a background in studying mentalism, I can assure you ALL of us can be manipulated and distracted by entities that have enough seemingly small and insignificant bits of information about our daily routines in their widely sold and cross-indexed databases.

The less data you give these entities, the more boring targeted content and ads become, and the more attention you will have left for things that matter.

[rpdillon]

Sounds like you'd expect a study on this to show that use of tap to pay leads to mental health decline.

I think we've strayed too far from the original study.