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Google Wallet: the End of Anonymous Shopping
jfruhlinger writes "Google today announced Google Wallet, an NFC-based payment system that will allow people to pay for purchases just by waving their phone across a reader. It's the beginning of a future where commercial transactions are 'frictionless' and convenient — but it's a future where every transaction can be tracked and data-mined, as Dan Tynan points out. Stores can user information about your Doritos purchases to rearrange their wares; Google could push coupons via its new Google Offers service; your health insurance company might be interested in your sodium intake."
There's always BitCoin.....
Um, OK.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Fuck that, they'll just go to Experian.
Experian? Who are they? Yeah, if you don't know about Experian, you don't understand privacy today.
See, Experian is, to the public, a credit rating agency. So they just so happen to collect all your credit card data, loan information, and so forth. Fancy that!
But it gets better.
See, they also collect all that loyalty card data that you believe is so difficult to acquire... among *many* other things. They then correlate the data up, package it, and sell it to whomever wants it. Traditionally this has been direct mail marketers, among other things.
And the breadth of the metrics available? Astounding. People who purchase that data know if your fucking car lease is about to expire or not.
So trust me when I say, Google Wallet is nothing. The privacy horse ran out of the barn a long long time ago.
If you want to stay anonymous, use bitcoin.
FTFY
http://www.google.com/wallet/how-it-works-security.html
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