Google Wallet: the End of Anonymous Shopping 253
jfruhlinger writes "Google today announced Google Wallet, an NFC-based payment system that will allow people to pay for purchases just by waving their phone across a reader. It's the beginning of a future where commercial transactions are 'frictionless' and convenient — but it's a future where every transaction can be tracked and data-mined, as Dan Tynan points out. Stores can user information about your Doritos purchases to rearrange their wares; Google could push coupons via its new Google Offers service; your health insurance company might be interested in your sodium intake."
Re:How the hell is this different from credit card (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hyperbole (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not like I can Google "nschubach bought ? on Tuesday" and get a full report.
Why don't you try that query yourself? I did. Congratulations with your purchase [rx8club.com] of '04 Silver RX8 - G/T Package - 6 Spd. MT in June 2004. It was probably nice weather then in Schaumburg, IL. Is there anything else you'd like to announce to the whole world? Google doesn't need to do a thing here, other than to collect what people willingly reveal about themselves.
With regard to my own username, it is short and common (as in RFC 783). Besides, I don't reuse usernames. The only way one can associate my posts across multiple sites is by writing style.
Re:Hyperbole (Score:2, Interesting)
I did work for Experian for over a decade in the division responsible for all those credit card offers you get in the mail. The amount of data Experian has on over 300 million people contained in their File One database is staggering. They can and do aggregate mountains of personal financial information from every conceivable source that is used to calculate thousands of different behavioral "attributes" and credit scores at the behest of banks, credit unions, insurance companies, collection agencies, government agencies, and so forth. It's their primary revenue generator that brings in billions every year. Experian was scarily nonchalant about the security of all this data too, with much of it floating around in easily steal able, unencrypted csv and flat files that are regularly sent overseas where much of the database manipulation work has been offshored.
This article and is about 15 years behind the times and Google Wallet is amateur-ville in comparison with what's already out there.