If you were a KGB agent in the heyday of Cold War surveillance, how would you design the perfect snooping system?
The system not only collects and files a great deal of data about your financial transactions-and that means a great deal of data about your life-but the system knows where you are every time you make such a transaction.
Our payments system poses a greater surveillance risk because advertising is how most platforms make money online.
Each time you swipe your card to buy a piece of fruit, at least six categories of corporations can receive your data, depending on how you pay: your bank, the payments network, the store itself, the point-of-sale system, mobile wallets like Google Pay, and financial apps like Mint.
The insidious thing about this kind of private surveillance system is that it's just so convenient.
If ever, consider just what a perfect surveillance system our payments network could be, as those Cold War theoreticians first brilliantly surmised in 1971.
The nice thing about this kind of private surveillance system is that we don't need to participate.
https://reason.com/2019/09/03/how-your-digital-purchases-could-serve-the-perfect-surveillance-network/
The system not only collects and files a great deal of data about your financial transactions-and that means a great deal of data about your life-but the system knows where you are every time you make such a transaction.
Our payments system poses a greater surveillance risk because advertising is how most platforms make money online.
Each time you swipe your card to buy a piece of fruit, at least six categories of corporations can receive your data, depending on how you pay: your bank, the payments network, the store itself, the point-of-sale system, mobile wallets like Google Pay, and financial apps like Mint.
The insidious thing about this kind of private surveillance system is that it's just so convenient.
If ever, consider just what a perfect surveillance system our payments network could be, as those Cold War theoreticians first brilliantly surmised in 1971.
The nice thing about this kind of private surveillance system is that we don't need to participate.
https://reason.com/2019/09/03/how-your-digital-purchases-could-serve-the-perfect-surveillance-network/
No comments:
Post a Comment