Don’t you hate it when you buy dog food at the pet store, then, as you browse the web moments later, advertisements for dog food appear on your screen? Or maybe you’re having a private conversation with you’re wife at home when you mention needing to get an oil change, and later ads for Jiffy Lube show up on a social media platform. Most people in the western world have had a similar experience in recent years, and most people I’ve encountered agree it’s downright creepy.
These are just a couple of the ways Big Tech firms nonconsenually spy on you, and then sell your private data, a practice known as Surveillance Capitalism. Sure, you’re well aware Big Tech firms have been using your web search history, or likes on Facebook, or any other aspect of your digital fingerprint to tailor ads to you for years.
More recently, however, financial institutions, such as Chase or Visa, have been selling your purchase data to third-party services. And it’s about to get a lot worse, as tech firms have been racing to get into the consumer payments market with the likes of Apple Pay, Google Pay, the Apple credit card, Facebook’s attempts to integrate payments across it’s suite of applications (FB messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc), Facebook’s foray into ‘cryptocurrency’ with Libra, etc.
Now we learn tech and data behemoth Google is forging ahead with retail banking products such as checking accounts. They don’t even care about banking or expect to make much money off of it, instead they brazenly want to spy on you ever more thoroughly:
Google’s key motivation is customer data, according to analysts.
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“Google is likely entering into these partnerships to increase its insights into consumer purchase behavior (and consumer finances more broadly),” Wells Fargo’s internet analyst Brian Fitzgerald
You may find this unsettling, but, hey, that’s just the cost of enjoying the interwebs these days, right? Wrong. Banish those submissive, obedient thoughts from your head. Privacy is a fundamental human right. Remember, privacy is not secrecy. Privacy is about consent — consensually choosing what, how, when, and to whom you reveal private information. When a company surveils you without your explicit consent, it is tantamount to rape — digital rape.
Wake up! With big tech companies knowing everything about your online and financial life, it’s not long before this information is not just exploited for commercial gain, but for political control. Every inch closer tech companies come to a complete platform for all aspects of our life — banking, finance, documents, photos, calling, email, messaging, search, music, etc, etc — the closer we come to WeChat, the mass surveillance and censorship platform the Chinese government uses to ‘turn off’ its citizens when they misbehave. *Shudders*
Bitcoin fixes this. Opt out of draconian surveillance capitalism, financial and political censorship, and digital rape. Opt out of a dystopian future. Protect yourself. Embrace the power of a non-sovereign, hard-capped supply, global, immutable, decentralized, censorship resistant, digital store of value. Buy Bitcoin.