Financial privacy has practically vanished over the last 50 years. Most people are in denial about it, and still believe that their relationship with their bank or their credit union is confidential -...
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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.
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As part of just living in… the world, I already kind of assumed it was possible for some parties, credit card companies in particular, to pry in to my financial activity and also interested governments to compel banks to hand over whatever they had, and/or possibly just hand over everything about everyone to government all the time automatically. This was bad enough, however, even I was surprised and shocked to learn how bad it was with my own bank when they sent me a letter gleefully telling me that as of the date of the letter they had now managed to sell my data to even more 3rd parties. I was not, up until that point aware that they were selling my data at all, and that 3rd parties (other than the credit card company) were getting access to it not just because of powers to compel, like people might expect of governments, but purely because the bank was literally handing it over to whoever was willing to pay for it, no consent on my part necessary. I don’t know what changed that required them to apparently have to now disclose this to me, but I assume that they were forced, hence the letter. The sneaky motherfuckers didn’t frame it that way though, not “due to recent legislation the bank is obliged to inform you blah blah blah”, no just “good news removed, we were selling your data, we still are, but we used to too, and now we’re selling it to more people, hope you like egregiously unethical behaviour because we put a travesty in to our travesty so you can experience a travesty while processing the first travesty”.
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Hm. The link is actually a video on odysee.com. I’m experiencing no issues on my end, and it’s even letting me watch the video in a miniplayer within Lemmy itself. I’m using LibreWolf, a privacy fork of Firefox, so I don’t know if this is an issue on Chrome-based browsers or not.
mpv https://odysee.com/@NaomiBrockwell:4/Financial-surveillance:e?r=2zW2U8ZcN8MsrJT5cgp9uunSj5LEJEDRWut
It’s a talking-head video presentation on a well-known video publishing website.
Given your browser couldn’t show anything useful from that webpage, @kugmo@sh.itjust.works offered a solution: just feed the URL into mpv, which happens to be excellent at playing audio/video from web pages if you also have yt-dlp installed.
My bank knows my employer and which ATM I take money out of.
If you’re in the US, your bank knows way more about you than that and it’s naive to believe otherwise. A lack of credit doesn’t mean a lack of tracking; it just means your data is being pulled from elsewhere.
If you’re not in the US, you might have a better chance at privacy.
What data? My point is that I use cash.
Do you have a drivers license? A social security number? A phone number that you’ve used for anything else? Utility bills? Relatives? A car? Other large property?
Cash doesn’t mean shit unless you pay for everything in cash and never use the same info (including name, address, phone number, social, etc) for everything.
No car, no property, no phone number.
I don’t think a bank having my social security number is a privacy risk.
I do not give my name when I buy groceries or 99% of purchases. I don’t see your point.
You sound like piss poor guy.
It’s okay to be naive! The video talks about what data your bank has and how that gets used, as a security professional I know how all of this data is tied together plus the other data (assuming you don’t vote either?), and you don’t think there is anything tied to you so cool. Have fun with that. Keep pushing crypto.
Of course there is data tied to me. My bank sees who my employer is and everywhere I withdrawal money from an ATM. They don’t see my purchases.
And you’re talking to a security professional.
I really hope GNU Taller actually get adopted by at least one bank as it got funding for coming years.
I work in this industry and I can confirm that there’s fucking nothing ensuring the privacy of these transactions. Tens of thousands of people have full access to everyone’s credit card history, and that’s not counting unauthorized access and card skimmers.
Makes me glad I use Monero because nobody besides me and the recipient has access to that transaction.
Don’t use credit cards. Use cash (or Monero if buying online).
fiat cucks downvoting your comment
Exactly. Those are the only two ways of ensuring privacy.
Well, there’s zcash too
Yes, but since their chain has transparent and private transactions, then somebody knows you did a private transaction, which is still a problem. It becomes a, why didn’t you use a public transaction? What did you buy with that private transaction? Why did you need that private transaction? Why couldn’t it have been a public transaction?
With Monero, since all transactions are private at all times, there’s no need to ask that.
Huh i didnt know zcash had transparent transactions?
And you don’t need a “view key” to see them like in Monero?
I don’t know that much about Zcash but apparently not because they have a shielded and an unshielded pool. So it would appear that some transactions are public while others can be private. And that’s still not okay.
the bank worker i interacted with the other day just casually had access to everything
Opt out, use Monero.
so I can buy illicit drugs, and…?
wake me up when I can use it to buy my fucking groceries.
For groceries and most regular purchases (including online stores), there is cash. But I do use Monero for a legit reason - paying for my VPS and domain.
If you pay for privacy oriented online services, mostly by providing a privacy respecting service, they often accept Monero.
Off the top of my had I know that Mullvad VPN and Standard Notes accept Monero, but if you look for it, there are probably more.
Other than that, PrivacyGuides recommends CoinCards as a gift card store that accept Monero payments. CC has gift cards for several popular online services. They are not yet available in Europe, but if you know that the service you want to sign up for does not enforce using the gift card in the appropriate region, you can buy it from a region that is already supported.
Thank you for sharing these resources!
the world doesnt consist of the us and europe. in fact those are like, 12% of the planets population combined?
Did you read my comment? I mean, you know, to the end.
I use it to buy gift cards in India, currently the most populous country on the planet(for better or for worse), that adds up to… 35-45% of the world population; the figure does not even include the African and south American countries where there is a significant adoption of cryptocurrencies due to high inflation rates of the local currency.
I buy groceries with monero every month since Jan 2023 to present
sure, if you are in the little restricted areas where this is possible
What do you mean by little restricted areas? Because I could do it anywhere in the United States. And that doesn’t seem like a little restricted area.
the united states is what, 5% of the world’s population?
the rest of the planet exists dude.
That’s true. It can also be done in Europe and Canada. So you at least have to combine those together. So you’re probably looking at maybe 10%.
Least eurocentric user.
How do you do that? Monero is one of few coins that interested me back in the day, so I am not a hater at all. But adoptation is very much lacking, and i I have no idea how you but groceries with xmr.
Coincards.com gets me an instacart giftcard. Instacart card gets me my local grocery chains, local grocery chain store gives me food. I eat food and am eating monero.
Nice
Cool. Thx. No option for EU.
I bought groceries with Monero for years. Just buy a gift card for your fav grocier.
Use Monero for what? Buying book in the morning having a blind eye on thousands of liters of water I just waste?
Monero doesnt have ASICS so is not nearly as energy intense. You mine on regular CPUs you can buy off the shelf in your local electronics store. My miner has been running for over a year and has never used a drop of water unless its upstream at the power company itself. My air conditioner uses about 5x more power and my heater uses 7x-15x more power. At least if i had more mining computers going id get enough heat to warm my room and the monero id get from it could subsidize my power bill. I could turn 1500 watts of power into 1500 watts of heat only or I could turn 1500 watts of power into 1500 watts of heat and some Monero.
Edit: Not to mention, I don’t have to pay workers to drive cars to a building that I had to pay workers to mine the minerals for out of the ground and ship thousands of miles.
Not the greatest solution
Why?
Crypto
You are dismissing an entire category with that one word. Are you sure you’re not throwing out any babies with that bathwater?
Crypto is problematic for many reasons.
removed by mod
I’m smart enough to not “invest” in something that has no real world value and that isn’t protected under law.
Crypto tends to be pump and run and I don’t trust it worth a hoot
Besides the power which crypto helps with because it absorbs stranded power or gives a customer for steady income to a power company that can help build more infrastructure. What else is a problem with crypto?
Crypto is just as insecure as credit cards. The whole point of the blockchain is that everyone can see all transactions.
Not Monero!
You’re talking about privacy, not security.
In crypto all transfers require a cryptographic signature from a private key that doesn’t have to be shared. In credit cards, you literally give your private key to the merchant and trust them to take the right amount. The difference of these two security models is enormous.
Also, privacy coins are private. The blockchain isn’t a ledger that shows who spent what to who in privacy coins like Monero.