People who are generally ambivalent on TOR are the ones that we need to convert. I believe the message needs to be that anonymity is not only desirable but mandatory as well, especially because of the rise of platforms that literally track each and every possible metric about your daily life and habits. Besides, even if someone says that TOR is used for illegal purposes, we all need to remind them that legality is distinct from morality and is always defined by those currently in power.
back
3 comments
"Tor is only used for illegal purposes" is as valid as saying "only criminals use cash so they can buy things without a digital trail." I pay cash -- and refuse to use affinity/shopper cards because I would rather pay for my privacy which is worth more to me than 4 cents/gallon off on gasoline.
> worth more to me than 4 cents/gallon off on gasoline.
The stores are getting wiser about this. My local Fred Meyer (a Kroger brand now) has a fuel rewards program -- for every $100 you spend, you get 10 cents off per gallon on your next fillup. Given how expensive groceries are, a lot of people are saving more like 50 cents per gallon, not 4.
They've also started doing instant discounts at the register, which was something that Safeway aggressively did from the beginning. FM isn't quite that aggressive yet, but when I scan the shopper card just before paying, it isn't unusual for it to knock $20-30 off a $150 purchase.
If it really were just 4 cents a gallon, I expect less people would bother. But it's not. The stores are steadily increasing the penalty for shopping without a loyalty card.
> They've also started doing instant discounts at the register, which was something that Safeway aggressively did from the beginning. FM isn't quite that aggressive yet, but when I scan the shopper card just before paying, it isn't unusual for it to knock $20-30 off a $150 purchase.
It's a shitty psychological trick that Fred Meyer pulled off.
People think shopper cards save money, and while it's technically true, it's the wrong framing of what's happening. What's really happening is that the store requires the card to get sale prices.
In other words, Fred Meyer creating the shopper card did not create additional savings. It just started gatekeeping sales behind data collection.
But they'll always give you a new card. You can sign up for a new loyalty program id every time you checkout. But then again... If you don't pay by cash it won't matter as they'll link the sales by your payment method and bridge the multiple loyalties.
Also if they were thinking they could have bluetooth beacons at the registers to track cash users that have bluetooth enabled.
Also they have cameras looking at every checkout line. They implemented them originally to observe when lines got too backed up so they could automate sending out more cashiers. They could move to facial recognition of they really wanted. Not sure if they do that now.
Yeah. Or here's another way to frame that: stores started punishing you for not providing your information by giving you higher prices.
Or another one: when you use a savings card, you trade some of your data for a couple bucks off.
(While on that note: in many countries – pretty much everywhere I've been, actually – you can just get a new savings card every couple months, or get a few and round-robin them and replace every couple months etc. Just fill out the sign up form with some garbage data and you're good to go.)
I've yet to see an actual detailed argument on how the data collected helps them; the only thing I've ever seen was the creepy "target knows you're pregnant" - but most grocery store chains send me the exact same ads as everyone else, and nothing is personalized or targeted.
So what are they doing with the loyalty card data? Nothing? Is it all just a mental trick to get me not to go elsewhere?
From my experience, some stores do personalize ads based on your profile. The main use however is sharing data back with brands: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158826058/what-kroger-is-doi...
I was just in Safeway (a former Albertson's if it matters) yesterday. I bought a couple of items but bypassed the scanning of a shopper card/entering a phone number. The self-checkout knocked the prices down to the reward card level anyway. I can only assume they've linked my payment method to a reward card in the past. That or they are no longer requiring rewards cards to get the discounts.
Since the register already priced my bill higher at the time I swiped my card and then dropped the price, I have to assume it's the former.
$0.50 per gallon is $5 if I fill my 12 gallon Corolla when it's low. That's still not a lot of money.
When you make less than $15 an hour like a lot of Americans that can be quite a bit of money. Especially since a lot of older cars that they would be more likely to drive are probably less fuel efficient and have larger tanks.
Cash is still king in Germany, and it always weirds tourists out. Personally I think it's great, and just like you do much of my shopping in cash because I don't want my bank knowing everything about my diet etc.
> Cash is still king in Germany, and it always weirds tourists out.
I love it. I drove to Germany to have the maintenance done, change the tires and renew the extended manufacturer warranty for two years on my german car (extended warranty which I need to pay for) and it was a hefty bill. I pulled a bit more than 3 000 EUR in cash and they were just used to it. As in: a totally normal occurrence.
I did it basically to test if it was true that cash was king in Germany: I had credit and debit cards in backup just in case. But cash just worked.
Cash is fighting back in the USA, lots of restaurants and even shops (including mechanics, etc) have a surcharge for credit cards now, but if you pay cash or debit (or even check at some of them) - no surcharge.
The concert venue I went to last weekend is cards only now. There seems to be a bifurcation in the market where some vendors take cards grudgingly and others want nothing to do with cash.
There certainly is - the smaller vendors are trying to avoid raising prices as best they can whilst the big ones are trying to reduce cash handling costs.
Covid drastically increased the uptake of cards in Germany. Cash only places became a lot more scarce.
Japan though, now there's a place where cash only shops are still prevalent.
Even Japan is changing. Non contact payment is becoming popular.
I was there a few weeks ago and cash-only places were still very common, I'd say at least 10x as common as Germany at the end of COVID. (Though granted, some places might only take EC-Karte)
We were hitting cash only places all the time there, whereas in Germany I found that cash only became rare during the pandemic.
Hell, even recharging the IC cards in Japan had to be done using cash at a machine. Why can't you use a debit card? Who knows.
Every time I think about leaving Germany I think about some small things we have that are really nice.
That said ... paying electronically is so convenient, damn it.
The opposite here, whenever I encounter a cashless-only shop it really weirds me out. Like, legal tender anyone??
(haven't been to Germany)
>Like, legal tender anyone??
For debts. Steal it, get caught, be ordered to pay restitution. Then your legal tender argument will make sense.
Could you unpack it? Of course if I steal your cash I would be guilty etc, how does that make OK not accepting currency that is legal tender in country?
I did, in the first two words: For debt.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_tender
Various laws may exist elsewhere enforcing a requirement to accept cash (or not, depending on the jurisdiction). But an appeal to "legal tender" isn't going to cut it. Legal tender for what? For debt.
You may be misinterpreting a technical term. "Debt" is everything in economy. You make me a coffee, I am in debt to you for $1, take my note if you accept legal tender. Which I assumed you must if you are a legal business.
> I don't want my bank knowing everything about my diet etc.
Germans have a certain paranoia. I understand where it comes from but how are you ever going to move on if you hold these beliefs so tightly?
I find it odd to phrase it as "move on" given the direction much of the rest of the world is headed. Anytime things become digitized, the centuries of civil and social rights, rights which people fought and died for, end up getting completely thrown to the wayside. The exact same would happen to money.
In some ways we're already seeing the foreshadowing of this in some of the previously most liberal places on Earth, like Canada. Even if one may not agree with what the truckers were protesting about, it seems unconscionable to freeze people's bank accounts as punishment for engaging in, or supporting, a completely and genuinely peaceful protest. [1]
[1] - https://fortune.com/2022/02/16/trudeau-freeze-freedom-convoy...
How is cash helping with this? Should we start storing the notes under our mattresses or? Sorry I’m not sure I understand your point.
People got their bank accounts frozen because they contributed to fundraisers for the trucker protest. If they could contribute to the protesters using a more private method of payment, they wouldn't be subject to these authoritarian retributions from the government.
In the 1930s, "Progress" was the replacement of a relatively free society with Nazi authoritarianism. In the 1940s, "Progress" (for half of the country) was the replacement of Nazi authoritarianism, where the secret police mostly targeted ethnic/political/sexual minorities, with Soviet authoritarianism, where the secret police targeted literally everyone and everything. So perhaps that is an object lesson in the value of not "moving on" from a relatively good situation
Tell me who you believe has moved on, and myself and other commenters will share with you how they're being stabbed.
> I believe the message needs to be that anonymity is not only desirable but mandatory as well, especially because of the rise of platforms that literally track each and every possible metric about your daily life and habits
Normal people don’t care if their metrics are being tracked - that is happening to practically everybody all day every day, and very few people are experiencing any direct and measurable negative consequences. In their defence, why should they weigh the hypothetical-risk above the real-benefits of giving up privacy (ie, convenience and price)?
I believe if the message of privacy advocates is to have any effect at all on normal people, we really need to start focussing on things that normal people care about, not hypothetical and philosophical arguments
It's a frog in a steadily boiling water problem. People not caring about their privacy enables certain actors to increasingly encroach it and then suddenly you find that these actors know everything there is to know about you including what you buy, eat, use, discard etc. This is not just a hypothetical scenario. For instance, look at any digitally capable dictatorial regime. No one now has the power to speak up in these regimes because everything they say is tracked and can be traced back to them and they themselves gave the regime this power happily in the past.
The right to access anonymity is desirable,but so is preserving a society in which it doesn't really matter for most people.
Everyone should know how to use Tor, but we shouldn't have to, at least not all the time.
Anonymity is one of those things that if you do not fight consistently for, will be eventually taken away from you. I fail to envision a society where anonymity doesn't really matter for most people because as long as there is a society, it'll imply there is a control structure. And as long as there is a control structure, it'll keep on dictating what you can and cannot do. Unless you unreasonably assume that such a structure will always, without a fail, be perfectly correct, in the event that you disagree with it, you're certain to be in trouble.
I'd like to reiterate once again, there is a distinction between morality and legality. For instance, it's never immoral to bring wrongdoings to light, and yet, it's horrendously illegal to expose classified government secrets, even if they are terrible.
Preserve implies we have that society now.
People's data is being farmed and their identity leaked and sold on the dark web, and they're probably not educated enough to care. That's what you want to preserve?
> identity leaked and sold on the dark web
You mean, after it's sold and resold by the likes of facebook or google in open transactions?
Are Facebook and Google opening bank accounts with people's identities or stealing from their paypal accounts? Not sure what point you're making here.
No, they and other large vendors are just selling data that enables that. The fraudsters couldn't work without the industrial torrent of personal data that is an object of avid commerce.
It weirds me out any time I open YouTube on the TV and the first thing I see is an ad related to some recent online purchase, however obscure.
No, criminals are. Criminals will also break into your home and steal your stuff, or break into your car and drive away, or pick your wallet right out of your pocket.
The existence of crime is not an example of the need for anonymity.
I'm in an area of the world where that doesnt quite work so I just thought of entities trading your personal information for marketing profit...