TheMuffinMan

I actually totally agree with this; I just think the solution is holding these companies to account rather than forcing all users to submit very personal identification.

I think you’re imagining the difference between them from a technological point of view to be much bigger than it actually is.

I have debit and credit cards, Visa and Mastercard for both. Using them feels identical; one draws from your bank account balance and the other goes towards an invoice sent to you at the end of the month.

When you pay with them, the vendors themselves don’t see any private information about you, other than the card number and the way your name is written on the card. Some of my cards only have my first initial and my last name.

They can, however, track that card number across multiple purchases or with partners to build a profile.

Visa and Mastercard themselves can see a lot more, but that’s a given if you use any kind of banking services anyway.

In terms of where they’re accepted, I’ve used them all over the world and the only time it mattered which type I use, is this one flight where Ryanair was not accepting debit when I was trying to buy water… Somehow you have to borrow money to eat/drink on board, which is just silly.

I grew up with the Internet of the noughties and saw some screwed up stuff. That should have been on my parents, but I turned out okay anyway.

Canada’s just the latest to join the mass surveillance club.

I haven’t been able to post to reddit in years now, because I refuse to browse it without a VPN, and while it still lets me in, any account that I make immediately gets shadowbanned as soon as I make a post or a comment.

I can’t tell if it’s because their bot filter is just terribly implemented, or because they don’t want me on their platform if I don’t surrender my public IP address.

I’m pretty sure they just use a “how many different accounts under the same public IP” type of logic, because even if I create an account on a 4G network (no VPN) and post, this happens. Cellular networks often use double NAT (unique internal/carrier IP, shared public IP) to avoid allocating a public IP to each mobile device.

I’ve given up a long time ago. My only exposure to reddit now is when a search results page links me to a post. The most helpful stuff is usually from a decade ago or earlier.