(edit: wow that link preview is really garbage when Lemmy references another Lemmy link)

Cash has become compromised by mass surveillance as an instrument for anonymous payments. According to the German article, ATMs read serial numbers of dispensed banknotes and associate them to the person making the withrawal. Then when the serial numbers are read again by the armored car service fetching the cash from wherever you spent it, the central DB links everything together. But because banknote serial numbers are not “personal data”, the GDPR is completely impotent to this concealed form of tracking. Cash users have no idea that they have lost an expectation of privacy.

Consumers are fucked either way. Banking and paying electronically generates a huge digital footprint which pretends to have GDPR protections. The GDPR is essentially an unenforced façade to stage a privacy illusion as a lubricant for digital transformation. The GDPR is most especially unenforced in the banking sector. So the choice is between fake legal protection and slightly better technical protection. You cannot “have your cake and eat it too”.

Cash is realistically the streetwise choice for consumers who know better. But it’s an absolutely unregulated laissez faire free-for-all blank cheque for rampent systemic unchecked unwarranted surveillance. Probably not many consumers will be wise enough to separate their machine-dispensed (tracked) cash from their quasi anonymous banknotes, while treating coins as the ultimate refuge.

Interesting how the IP address your ISP assigns to you is deemed personal data, but the serial numbers associated to you by your ATM withdrawal are not.

The bottom of the post linked to this post has an English translation of the German article.