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Presumably if you have tolls on every service, you're spending at each location you're interested in. Presumably if you're doing this over the Internet, you're doing this with a credit card. Now you've just decided to give the credit card companies some nice information. In fact, this information is even more specific: it's the list of things you're actually willing to pay to use.

So then we're going to decide to change cash (not credit) for Bitcoin (and hope that guy doesn't sell the address to a marketer) and use that everywhere.

So the question then is who you want to be tracked by.



Not really. Your ISP could - for example - see which sites you are visiting and then make a payout on your behalf, aggregated with all its other users.


Flattr does this. You pay Flattr once a month, and they pay each site once a month. They just count up how much each user owes each site and makes a lump charge/payment.


And then the ISP just sells the data in a marketing profile.

See also: What Verizon already does.


Except the small difference, where credit card companies are required to uphold privacy in much greater extent than some random SF startup ever will.


Credit card companies are probably the worst, most cynical violators of consumer privacy. They have been selling data on peoples spending as well as their personal details to companies like Acxiom for years before Google or Facebook were even created.

There are almost no requirements in the US for them to "uphold privacy". Most privacy actions (by the FTC etc) concentrate on "online privacy", which is of course only one segment of what the CC companies deal with.

Read [1],[2],[3]. Surprise, surprise: the default narrative of Google and Facebook being the aggressive upstarts pushing the boundaries on what is allowed is almost completely untrue. The credit companies and data brokers have been doing things that Google and Facebook wouldn't dream of doing for years.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/business/a-data-broker-off...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quie...

http://www.zdnet.com/global-consumer-data-broker-plans-to-re... [3]


Are they really? Because IIRC various credit rating companies will sell your data to nearly anyone. In fact, a dark web group sold on legitimately purchased data from one of the largest credit rating companies in the world last year. I don't think these companies care about your privacy anywhere near as much as you'd think, and I don't think it's a net positive to rely on them.




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