jsr on Nostr: Some of the least exploitative consumer interactions happen between individuals & ...
Some of the least exploitative consumer interactions happen between individuals & small / local vendors. These have the potential for mutual trust and reciprocity + possibility for sanctions in both directions if trust is violated.*
Trust + your private information is held in a distributed way & there are some social protections for your data.
A small shop gets hurt if you stop patronizing them because they violated your trust, for example. And if you cheat your nearest grocery store and they refuse you service, this is a cost for you.
These relationships are increasingly being replaced with unidirectional information harvesting where all arrows of data sharing point to the intake pipes of a centralizing enterprise.
The more this happens, the more the power consolidates up. And payment processors are speeding the process... trying to become the intercessors in those trust dynamics.
Your data heads to companies whose incentive is to always exploit any biometric / personal information you share with them for every-profitable-thing they can think of. Collecting biometrics to validate a trusted transaction becomes...hey we now have a new identity database we can sell for mass surveillance.
The incentive will always be data disempowerment: propagate your info as widely as profitable, far outside of what you would ever want or meaningfully consent to.
The bigger the set of such data & the more centralized, the more potential for harm...
And the lower the ability for any individual that has been burned by the transaction to meaningfully sanction the entity that abused their trust/ information.
*of course there are always edge cases where the vendor is small but super wealthy/connected etc and the consumer isn't. The point is that the further we get from this, the greater the chance that the dynamic is fully unequal.
Trust + your private information is held in a distributed way & there are some social protections for your data.
A small shop gets hurt if you stop patronizing them because they violated your trust, for example. And if you cheat your nearest grocery store and they refuse you service, this is a cost for you.
These relationships are increasingly being replaced with unidirectional information harvesting where all arrows of data sharing point to the intake pipes of a centralizing enterprise.
The more this happens, the more the power consolidates up. And payment processors are speeding the process... trying to become the intercessors in those trust dynamics.
Your data heads to companies whose incentive is to always exploit any biometric / personal information you share with them for every-profitable-thing they can think of. Collecting biometrics to validate a trusted transaction becomes...hey we now have a new identity database we can sell for mass surveillance.
The incentive will always be data disempowerment: propagate your info as widely as profitable, far outside of what you would ever want or meaningfully consent to.
The bigger the set of such data & the more centralized, the more potential for harm...
And the lower the ability for any individual that has been burned by the transaction to meaningfully sanction the entity that abused their trust/ information.
*of course there are always edge cases where the vendor is small but super wealthy/connected etc and the consumer isn't. The point is that the further we get from this, the greater the chance that the dynamic is fully unequal.
quoting nevent1q…d2m0Full biometric KYC for a sandwich.
Absolutely not, Jeff.
