Obviously cash is the more private option, but I have had trouble getting away from the convenience of using cards. Is there a way to use debit or credit cards and preserve privacy?
You must log in or register to comment.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 14 users / day
- 18 users / week
- 24 users / month
- 15 users / 6 months
- 20 subscribers
- 619 Posts
- 1.56K Comments
- Modlog
Credit cards are to be avoided, unless you want to put a name on your transaction, which you usually don’t
I try to pay cash at small businesses. Having that much on hand is not really convenient
I know I shouldn’t for privacy reasons, but I use credit for almost everything.
Of course the scam is that prices go up 3-6% to account for credit card fees, then the credit card companies give you some of it back. Of course if you don’t participate you are just paying higher prices for nothing.
In europe there is a max comission of 2-3% :p
Yup, a much more reasonable system and largely prevents the scam. That is why I didn’t use a credit card when I lived in Europe. IBAN transfers also make it feasible for online without credit/debit. However debit (or credit) is still significantly more convenient for day-to-day transactions in my opinion.
Yes, sadly thats true. I am actually looking into an smart payment ring hehe.
I usually try to use cash, but the convenience of being able to use online banking (and the requirement many sites/services have for online banking) makes it difficult to only use cash.
I always use cash. Mostly because I like it, it’s fast and flexible
I doubt there is a way to use debit or credit cards while limiting the amount of information about your life your bank can see. I am in the same camp though, using a debt card for almost everything (and even shopping online) for convenience even though I know it sacrifices privacy.
Cash for Gift Cards?
Cash when possible, if not then crypto. I would not call cash more private, your bank can see lots of details. When you went to the bank, there are cameras within the bank + the ATM itself has a camera, but I know what you mean.
PayPal and other systems are black-holes to collect your private data, they share even more data to third-parties than my bank.
The footage is gone within days, but I’m pretty sure they have to log the serial numbers in connection with your bank account when you make a withdrawal :/
You really believe they delete something 😂… . oh boi … they upload everything into the cloud as cheap storage because hosting your own stuff is much more expensive, this is why Signal uses Google, AWS and Azure servers. At the end it does not matter what the bank deletes, Google makes copies I am sure, especially if the interest is high. I mean, how would you ever find out, they just duplicate, end. Or the feds forcing you by law or illegal to do it, but even if, Google etc. would not be allowed to talk about it because they sign a contract with the feds or govt. and in return they get something, I am pretty sure. Hard to prove, tho… sure.
Everything is in the system, your ID, tooth documents everything. Trying to solve things by afterwards hiding something is pointless, no one escaped every. Maybe D. B. Cooper but that was before PCs and CCTVs went mainstream.
Storing metadata is really cheap because its small. But no one keeps raw security footage around any longer than necessary, because high quality video takes a lot of space.
Can disagree and prove that, join Telegram, check the mirror channels and other groups. They mirror anything, gore, live leak, CCTV cams, etc.
Self-hosting is more expensive than cheap cloud, otherwise everyone would self-host which is not the case. You also need to build an infrastructure if you self-host, no one usually does that because one small DOS attack and your little PI goes down, good luck bringing Google etc. down.
That said, I highly disagree, it is a naive point of view and dangerous. If it comes to be reliable, I always choose Google servers over your little mini server.
What? Do you think that ATMs security footage are just available in the wild or are uploaded to public spaces on Telegram or Mega or whatever?
Storage is cheap. The company I work for handles the security cams installed by some local town administrations (around 400 cams in total), and the entirety of the footage we collect is stored on our proprietary infrastructure. Of course you need some terabytes of storage at hand, but it’s not an ever-increasing amount of data because footage is erased every week to free up space and comply with the law. We work for third-parties so we have no interest in breaking the law and keeping footage past its expiration date, so I have no idea of what happens with banks and the footage they collect, but I’m pretty sure these kind of things are often handled on a local infrastructure, usually with the support of specialized IT companies (I don’t work for such a company but we somehow offer this service just to publicly-administrated entities and compete in the market with specialized companies) which are liable for what happens to the collected data. It’s not always so obvious that large amount of data = google or amazon-hosted. For what I’ve been able to see (keep in mind, this is anecdotal experience), it’s the opposite
I never said anything about public ATM footage in Telegram, the stuff you quoted is in response to the Admin and the hosting question. Most people, including myself, do not self-host for a bunch of reasons, it is cheaper and easier to upload your stuff into the cloud such as Telegram or Google Drive. My initial statement was that most providers, use and rely on third-party infrastructure and that externals could duplicate it, on their own, or they could be forced and that no one could find out. My statement regarding cheap and Telegram as an example was to show that people upload everything into the cloud, which is also the case, Google Drive and other services is full of Material, all sorts of material. Other services exist but they make maybe compared to big providers 10 percent of the traffic.
Most I know uses Google, AWS or Azure. Because they measure CPU work time, not even storage itself. That is how cheap they are. They are reliable, they are cheap as hell. If you want to build your own infrastructure like e.g. The-EYE did to host Terabytes of data you constantly need to upgrade, which is expensive. Oh well, and they went down because of what… money. The benefit is also that you do not need to worry, you pay for not only the provided services itself, also they take care of security issues etc. If you self-host you need to take care of all of that and upgrading the software alone is often not enough.
I rather trust experts who do this professional than some random dude who hosts his mini server that can be taken down without breaking a sweat. I tried that myself btw, for example I created a Tor server, it was not even public, took 2 hours until I got the first attack and it never stopped ever since then until I took it offline.
Your argumentation that we never do this or that is absolute redundant, assuming someone would do shady stuff with footage, no one would admit this anyway or he simply would be forced by contracts to never talk about such specific deals. However, it does not change anything regarding my statement that, if they can, they never delete things. Most people only delete stuff if they run out of storage, but typical scenario is run and forget it… until there are problems.
You claimed that banks never delete CCTV recordings from ATMs. So I really dont understand what you are arguing for or against.
Because the definition of deletion and removal of files are different these days.
Most networks hide your files but they are still stored on the server, despite the claim that they are deleted after xyz. Maybe from the index, but no one directly states from the servers or third-party servers that might be involved.
For example if you delete your account on Facebook, Discord and bunch of other services you still can access the files after you delete your Account. While your server, files are not visible, the URL will still work.
Most people - assume - that the word delete means that the provider or others that are somewhat involved with it actually physically delete everything, which is not the case.
But thats not how it works for a company that stores terrabytes of CCTV footage on Amazon S3. Either they pay for more and more storage over time (and it gets very expensive with video), or they pay a constant amount, and get a constant amount of storage. Which means they have to delete old files. Amazon certainly wont store anything at that scale for free.
I like to point out that delete all files might be impossible anyway, especially in Banks that record 24/7 a day. They do backups, if a bank claims - we delete all footage after X days, then they also need to delete all backup material, which I doubt they will do. The effort is very high.
I claim they delete or hide stuff from the normal storage servers, but they do not delete the backups and also I doubt that partner servers or other backup servers will do that. The effort to delete everything and hide specific things from backups would be huge and in not practicable. GDPR or DSGV also is not specific what delete means, physical delete files, or does it include backups too etc.
If I were a bank I would only delete stuff if,… if I ever run out of storage. Keeping such material is to value overall in case you need to go back 1 month or more to investigate a gang. Check how thieves checked out my bank and build strategies, some gangs work over MONTHS to exploit a bank’s weakness.
As said, you e.g. pay Amazon, Google these days for CPU time, the storage has no limit, Google even mention that directly that there is no limit, I mean there is but I saw piracy groups hosting PETABYTES of movies on Google Drive.
Yeah, no one said anything for free, in that I agree with you, but is cheaper than self-hosting, which was my overall point here. Which is why I mentioned some examples.
Maybe my definition forever is up for debate, but certainly more than they admit they do… Maybe only 7-10 years. No one knows. I know in Germany the fed keep documents 7-10 years, must do by law.
Of course deleted means there should be no copy of it. Backups are copies, so they are to be removed. Also, backups/archibe are usually compressed, not indexed and generally more expensive to access. ATM footage has no value at all for banks as far as I can tell, they are just there for legal reasons.
Cash as much as I can. No traces, simple and always work. I do like the quickness of cards as well as the “safety” in the sense that robbing people is less interesting when noone hasoney, but that’s not worth the privacy costs. Also, the more cards are used the more stores will refuse cash (seen in restaurants in UK), and society will exclude even further poor people. (Not anyone can have a credit card or a phone to pay with)