What are the options for increased privacy in how you pay for things where you live?
Cash is the obvious answer, but what about buying stuff online?
UK here. Thinking of ditching cards/contactless for good old cash. No idea about online payments - not doing anything illegal so might persevere with cards for now. Zero experience with crypto.
Cash is the correct option.
The person raising alarms about note scanning is misinformed about how frequently atms actually scan bills as they go out (it may be that all British atms have been updated in the last ten years but it’s not likely) and has completely discounted the laundering effect of just buying something small with your big bill or getting change at a store somewhere.
The argument against cash is that they know what bill you took out and that they know where that bill got deposited from, because the atm reads the bill serial and the bank does too when the shop makes their deposit. So they know where you went!
Even if you can only pull from an atm that scans the bill serial and you have a bank that actively correlates that information to your kyc account holder information and uses facial recognition to verify it’s you using the atm taking physical custody of the withdrawl, when you use a 50 or a 20 to buy a bag of potato chips or ask a bar to change your 100, the cash you get back isn’t now associated with you.
Further: places that deal with cash do not deposit every bill they take in, so there’s a decent chance that the panopticon will never associate your withdrawal with having gone to the corner store or the bar sometime after you withdrew the money. Those bills may have ended up making change for someone else or in the cash portion of the tip out or used to cover some expense that day or any number of other things.
So the choice is between some electronic form of payment where there’s an absolute paper trail between you and the recipient of your money, with a transaction id that can be correlated to your purchase.
Or
The possibility that the atm read the serial number of the bills dispensed to you, then if they made it into some shops daily deposit, the indication that that bill was possibly spent at that shop.
No indication it was you, no paper trail, no transaction id, no amount of purchase that can be correlated with actual items based on their price, just two data points with no real correlation between them.
Use cash.