One thing I’m concerned about is recording equipment leaving identifiable information without us knowing about it.
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Banks can track each banknotes serial number when you receive them from the ATM and when they are returned from the store you spent them at. This data could then be used to create a complete profile of your spending habits.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bill-tracking-Increasing-cash-tracking-worries-data-protectionists-10481696.html
Doesn’t work very well if you buy something directly from someone. Or if your cash is given out as change. Seems like it would make a wildly inaccurate profile.
Lots of stores also gives bills back out, the system makes zero sense, it can’t track anything at all. Like maybe 5% of bills are used once and then returned to the bank.
They don’t give $100 bills back out.
For cashback? Why wouldn’t they. That’s also why this system makes no sense, avoid the atm, use cashback. Fuck everyone’s metrics up.
Most places don’t do cash back, and the ones that do tend to have a limit of like $40. Wal Mart is a bit of an exception, as they’ll do $100, but you aren’t getting a $100 bill from them through their self checkout. You’ll only get 20’s.
So if you go to Wal Mart, and you go to one of the few real people to check you out, and you ask for it back in a $100 bill, and the teller happens to have gotten a $100 in since they had started that day, and the front lead hadn’t already cashed out the register since they received that $100 bill, then yes. In that case you’ll get a $100 bill and will slightly fuzz up the tracking metrics they could theoretically do.
I would expect a couple hundreds back if I use a thousand dollar bill.
Still legal tender, still required to be accepted.
There’s Noise everywhere, it’s a neat proof of concept, but it’s not gonna be used for what the user claimed.
Exactly.
Given a large enough time frame this can be treated as random noise which is easily filtered out, and this data isn’t necessarily meant to track your supermarket shopping. For example, you can use it to figure out where somebody went who has gone into hiding. They might have cleared out their bank accounts before leaving and with that data you can see where these banknotes are now showing up. Just wait at the store they apparently visit every Tuesday.
That’s completely made up. Most bills are given out to other customers once used in a store, the amount of bills that are used once and returned to the bank would be well under 5%.
Fantastic fabricated story though. Money laundering which has been done for decades would defeat this, it’s a scary story to share that has zero basis on reality.
Netzpolitik recently did an article about that. I consider them a credible source. How often bills are used before there are returned to the bank heavily depends on the denomination. Larger bills don’t circulate as much and at least in my country most stores return their cash income to the bank on a daily basis. People also tend to spend their money around the area where they live, so even if you couldn’t figure out which exact store a targeted person spends their money at due to circulation (which I doubt), you can still quickly find the general area in which they are staying.
Without some type of visual confirmation, it’s all noise.
On my way home from work, I grab $600 from the atm, $300 for my wife’s tattoo, $200 for me, and $100 for wife spending money.
After the appt the tattoos artists wife takes $200 and flys across country that night. I spend my $200 at the peelers, all those go to a dozen different girls and servers. My wife the next day goes shopping at an outlet mall and spends her $100 at 4 stores. The tattoo artist spends his $100 on beer.
We live on the same block and I pulled the money out across town. Who’s is the original takers purchases….?
It’s 95% noise, it’s useless unless you’re an investigator and have boots on the ground.
Again, it’s a fun story to share around the campfire though. Is it possible, yes, can it be done in actual practice, absolutely not. Not without some other information.
Yes that would destroy some data points but we are talking about a statistical approach here. How often do you give other people cash directly in comparison to spending it at stores. Given enough time and collected information local concentrations will show up. Its surveillance through data analysis with a new veneer.
I ONLY give other people cash, all my other purchases are debit/credit. Like MOST people and stores since Covid
The only time this works, is if it’s targeted, and that means an investigator is doing it. An automated system wouldn’t know what to do with any of the data. You’re severely overestimating how much people spend cash around them, that’s usually when it’s plastic. People use cash in “sketchier” places.
Again, zero basis on reality, it gets “destroyed” at every step without some manual intervention.
No manual intervention needed just track everything and retain the data for a long time. Then you can query the database for all serial numbers your target has ever taken out of an ATM and where they where returned. Circulation will diffuse these results somewhat but that follows a normal distribution. That means it is much more likely that a bill that was spent at a store by your target which is given out again as change, is more likely to be spent at another store near that original store. Aggregate this information over a couple of weeks or months and you will get a heatmap of locations to check out. You can run this operation automatically on all bank accounts if you want. Threshold the heatmap at some significant value and you get a list of stores visited by each person with X% probability.
If you always use card payments whenever it’s possible, it obviously isn’t necessary to analyze your cash transactions to learn where you are because you are already disclosing it :)
There are close to 2 billion unbanked people in the world. In the US, it’s less than 6% nationally, but over 10% in some states.
Many people who are not unbanked also often avoid electronic payments for privacy/security and other reasons.
The cash serial number tracking being described in this thread is useful for locating the neighborhoods frequented by someone who (a) avoids using electronic payments, and (b) maybe obtains cash from an ATM (or perhaps check-cashing service, in the case of an unbanked person) in places other than the neighborhoods they live in or frequent.
ATMs give out $20 bills. In order to get one back as change you’d have to pay with a bill larger than $20. I don’t remember the last time I carried something larger than a 20.
Bank ATMs can give out any denomination.