Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "What China’s New Digital Currency Tells Us About a Cashless Future | WSJ" video.

  1. There haven't been? Are you living under a rock or something? Both India and Brazil have launched huge app based cashless systems in recent years in a joint effort of government and banks, other two countries that are part of the BRICS economic block. Not private companies inside the country, I'm talking about central bank or government related cashless payment systems. Also, let me tell people something that they should've known already - your purchasing habits have been making the rounds already if you own a Visa, Mastercard, Amex or other flags. They have been actively selling consumer habit data to all sorts of people interested in buying it. This isn't speculation or conspiracy theory mind you, there's actual proof of them doing it. https://www.businessinsider.com/credit-cards-sell-purchase-data-to-advertisers-2013-4?op=1 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-and-mastercard-cut-a-secret-ad-deal-to-track-retail-sales https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2018/07/22/mastercard-amex-and-envestnet-profit-from-400m-business-of-selling-transaction-data/ https://www.fastcompany.com/90310803/here-are-the-data-brokers-quietly-buying-and-selling-your-personal-information https://www.newsweek.com/secretive-world-selling-data-about-you-464789 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/26/spy-your-wallet-credit-cards-have-privacy-problem/ Now, yes, governments spying on individual citizen consumer habits can be worse, as it can be used as a form of targetting against individual citizens, particularly for governments that are increasingly becoming more and more totalitarian over the years. Just keep in mind people - the line between collecting data with ad revenue purposes, and governments using that sort of data for population control, is extremely thin. It has been breached multiple times already, not by (only) chinese government, but by US government itself. We're talking about parallel economies based on private personal data being propped up with advertisement purposes in mind and being hijacked by governments, police and intelligence agencies for their own purposes. Just remember that in the case of US, we have pretty flagrant past cases opened up by whistle blowers showing mass surveillance and data collection of private citizens done without warrant and without transparency for actions including population control. So all this fearmongering about how China is doing things is at best feigning ignorance, and at worst highly hypocritical. Developed western nations have been doing worse for longer... if anything, China is taking the worst lessons and putting them in practice there too.
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