The thing in China is that so many trivial daily activities require government-issued ID. Buying a coach/train ticket. Buying a SIM card. Every website/mobile app registration require a mobile phone number, which means any account is easily traceable to your government-issued ID, too.

Hell, even visiting your friend in a hotel requires recording your ID before hotel staff will let you go upstairs (strictly enforced in cheap hotels). Internet cafes' administration system had been linked up to government ID systems more than a decade ago.

This is the Polizeistaat that Hitler could only dream of. It's a whole other level over any credit card surveillance.

When going overseas, all of those are required anyways:

1. The DB wants to see id (that they can verify) for Eurorail passes. The DB or the Belgian rail people require seeing the purchasing CC.

2. Buying a sim in europe requires a passport.

3. Most things you sign up for in the US requires a phone number. Loyalty programs certianly do.

   3.1 Walgreens requires your ID in hand to scan it to verify that you're "over 21" (Really they just want to rip the info)

 4. Hotels require passport details (England, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, France, carrebian, etc)

1. Yes, I've always had to use my passport with my Eurail passes; though often it's to prove I'm an American who is eligible for the cheaper pass.

2. No, only in certain countries. I've bought SIMs from vending machines in Iceland and Denmark. In Italy the merchant made me seriously promise, I really mean it to send him a photo of my passport as soon as I returned home with my SIM. He gave me his personal gmail address to do so (probably because he certainly didn't want that info going to his work email where it would be obvious he ignored the rules). In Germany, rumor was you basically had to be a German citizen to get a SIM; that turned out to be untrue but I cannot remember if I gave them my (EU but not German) passport. IIRC I could not buy a SIM in Sweden as a non-resident though. UK was no problem to buy a SIM.

3. Yeah, but that's just an identifier. You could use any number, and a different number for every merchant, and nobody would know. Though there was a case of a fireman convicted of arson, partially on evidence of firestarters bought using his wife's Safeway loyalty card number.

4. I can't really ever remember being asked for my passport in the 5 of those 6 countries, but of course it's not unreasonable to be expected to show ID so I cannot say for sure I never produced ID. Though I remember in Poland and I think the Czech Republic they actually hold your passport, which made me very uncomfortable. When you leave the room for the day you swap key for passport, and vice versa on your return. Whether this is government or business policy, I do not know.

> IIRC I could not buy a SIM in Sweden as a non-resident though.

You can definitely buy a SIM-card in Sweden without any kind of identification. However, if it is a SIM-card with a (non prepaid) subscription, THEN you have to ID yourself and be credit worthy (since you can potentially run up a huge bill that is invoiced afterwards).

Right, I'm an idiot. I have a Swedish SIM somewhere. It was Germany I was thinking of (and then, 3mo later, on a subsequent trip, easily bought a SIM anyway). So much misinformation out there -- and I suppose I'm not helping.

It's amazing how hard it is (as a foreigner) to come by solid information on the legal situation around SIM card purchases. It seems every company is different, and the more restrictive ones have an incentive to make it sound like a legal issue rather than a business decision.

This is the wiki you want: http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com

From June 2017 there will be no extra dataroaming charges in the EU. So you could buy a non-registered SIM card in The Netherlands (you can even buy them at the checkout counter at the supermarket) and use it all over EU member states.

Strange situation...

The world can't wait -- but I'd not call it strange.

I hadn't been to Europe since 2004, and on my subsequent visit in 2011, I just casually told my wife "we'll just buy SIMs at the first country we go to, surely they've sorted out this stupid roaming-when-you-travel-a-few-hundred-miles thing by now." WRONG.

So glad this is coming to an end. I've wasted far too much time and money country-hopping and having to spend 30-90+min in each country trying to get a working mobile phone. Locals probably don't realize how bad it is, but on prepaid plans you often cannot roam in foreign countries at any price. So as absurd it is to pay ATT here in the US $60 for 200mb or whatever insane rate, sometimes I wonder if it's worse to spend $40 per country per SIM card if I'm only there for a few days. Not to mention changing phone numbers constantly, assuming you would like to be reached...

Yeah, it took them long enough all right!

What I meant by "strange" is that European countries differ in their approach to unregistered SIM cards (due to safety/antiterrorism) but now agree on ending insane dataroaming charges. Any safety advantages to mandatory registration when buying a SIM card (IF there are any, which I doubt) are essentially nullified by this deal. A potential terrorist who wants a burner phone can buy a couple of SIM cards here in The Netherlands and take them to Belgium, for instance. European politics at its finest!

There are several providers doing EU-wide roaming already. I use Orange Spain which I've found to be good. If Spain isn't your first port of call you can buy an Orange Spain SIM on ebay. I think Aldi in Germany also does EU-wide roaming, and I've seen ads for others in other countries.

It's not the dataroaming itself, that has been possible for very long. The big deal about the agreement is that phone companies can't charge you extra anymore for dataroaming.

I have an unlimited calls/SMS plan with 11.5GB data a month. It costs me EUR45,-. When I travel 40 miles east from where I live my current data plan is no longer valid, and I have to pay EUR3.49 per 100MB/minutes/SMS. Yes, hundred MB. Not thousand. Those charges are insane!

Depends on where you are.

London just get it at arrivals of Heathrow.

Ireland theres a metro sim shop at arrivals.

Germany: go to your nearest netto

France: just find a shop.. but don't expect to get anything that works.

Carribean.. Never even tried.

  I remember in Poland and I think the Czech Republic they actually hold your passport

Not in the Czech Republic. I've worked in Prague for a year in 2006 and have stayed in lots of hotels through that time. I'm still visiting the city 10 - 12 times a year and usually stay in hotels.

They normally want to see your passport, or id upon check-in, but I never, ever experienced that they kept it after the check-in process.

Countries where I experienced this where mostly in Asia. Like Laos, or Cambodia. Not even in Vietnam they kept my passport after checking in.

> In Germany, rumor was you basically had to be a German citizen to get a SIM; that turned out to be untrue but I cannot remember if I gave them my (EU but not German) passport

From my experience, you do have to have your passport with you when getting a Sim. They usually make a photocopy of it. (This was from O2)

> 1. The DB wants to see id (that they can verify) for Eurorail passes. The DB or the Belgian rail people require seeing the purchasing CC.

Who except students uses Eurorail passes anyway, these days?

2. Buying a sim in europe requires a passport.

No; in Austria and Germany you can (at least at the moment) still buy SIM cards without providing an ID. Germany requires online activation but no one verifies if the address or the name is real.

I did not have to go online to activate my O2 SIM but I did provide a hotel address at purchase time. Of course it did not match any identity documents I had on me.

Some activation step happened when I inserted the SIM but it didn't involve using a computer.

Yeah, as a tourist I was surprised that all hotels ranging from 5 star to small local inns were insistent on having everybody's passport when checking in.

That's part of the law. It's because foreigners need to register with the local police where they are staying. If you stay in a hotel, the hotel does it for you.

This seems to be standard in many Asian countries.

The hotels I stayed at in Spain, France, and Italy made copies of mine.

Chinese hotels are required to purchase computerized ID readers, which are connected to police databases, where all kinds of records are stored. So if you have a history of drug abuse, expect late night urine checks. If you are an protester against illegal land-grabs checking into a hotel in Beijing, expect police and local government staff to show up in a few hours (to take you home or to detention centres without any court involved). In China, every person staying or visiting a hotel room must go through this ID check. In other countries, my experience is that normally they will ask for some sort of ID of one person, even if two or more will use the room.

The key issue is the data is on sale or not or potentially could be sold.

Agencies collecting data is totally fine. No one can avoid it in this world nowadays. Showing IDs seems very old-school. Remember PRISM? As long as one is using a smartphone, they are being tracked every single second.

Showing ID is a reminder that you can't function in society without staying in line. You can't really fall back on dropping out of digital, financial and location tracking no matter where you are.

Sure you can

Care to expand on that?

You need a network of people you can trust, or build some fake lifes, or do a lot of things in parallel of the system. Most of the time all of them together. It's work, but it's possible.

The problem is: it's more work for ordinary people. The systems in place are making it difficult for citizen to exist outside of the system, change it, or express differences. But it doesn't make it as difficult for criminals to be criminals, because those accept destructive consequences of their acts.

> build some fake lifes

How do you plan on doing that if most stores and banks stop accepting cash, and to get a debit or credit card you need to show government ID, which is electronically verified (it has an RSA keypair, signed by the government, stored on its chip).

It becomes impossible.

Most stores don't stop accepting cash right now, and I doubt they will in the future. I know more shops refusing credit cards than ones refusing cash in France.

You can also live without a bank. Several people I know do so. Again it's work, but it's possible.

A lot of the time, people saying it's impossible really are asking "how can I keep my confortable life 'as-is' while going off the grid". THAT is impossible. You can't live your current life, because it depends heavily on the system.

The situation changes depending on country.

In Sweden, not even banks accept cash anymore, and close to no stores. There, it is literally impossible.

Germany and France tend to be a lot more sceptical of new developments, which I’m grateful for.

This is a world humans are building AND sustaining by repeatedly saying yes to it, and it's putting the worst as a cork on the bottle in which the best should asphyxiate. That's just silly; the reasons are silly and the excuses are silly as well.

People claim it's necessary, but they're just parroting someone like the guardian in that Kafka story: it's just talk. Just walk on through while you still live. Until we do, I don't even see a "there" where we are, I just see black and white moving pictures and hear sad music.

There are always security/privacy trade-offs when it comes to applying policies. There are 1.4bn people in China. It has to take a much scalable approach to manage the population to ensure safety for average people and smooth functioning of a society. Especially given there is modern terrorism randomly seeks opportunities. Btw, not every app is interested in tracing you, and quite a few are giving options to email registration . And for Internet cafes, believe it or not, the gov set up ID-link was primarily to forbid children to go to there(most of them skip their classes to play games) since they have to wait till 16 yo to obtain a ID card.

Recording ID for hotel visitors and chef's knife purchases are hardly 'scalable'. And, it's not the apps that are tracing you. It's apps linked with ID that enables not only government surveillance, but surveillance that's as convenient for the government as possible, and for as many governmental agencies as possible.

I've found it interesting that in the press recently, you will usually find some discussion about privacy concerns regarding companies like Facebook/Google, but I very rarely see any mention of the privacy implications of credit card companies and credit bureaus selling customer data.

I'm admittedly not well informed on the subject but I assume this has been going on for decades, are there any consumer privacy laws around this? While I find Google data collection activities worrisome, I at least have some faith in their technical ability to keep that data safe. And unless I'm mistaken Google only sells targeted access but not the actual data which is what the credit card companies and bureaus do.

Typically, this data is not sold attached to an individual, but in aggregate and annonymized to help determine spending patterns, habits, etc.

There is a significant difference between this and extensive government data with your name attached, though I agree it's not great from a privacy perspective.

Typically (as has been said) you can opt out of this sharing.

Indeed, and the effects of this are visible everywhere. In the advertising systems of Google and Facebook, for example, you can target individuals according to their buying patterns - whether they've recently bought furniture, trips overseas, etc. The source of that data is information from credit card transactions.

You can opt out of all data sharing for your accounts in the United States. It's a hassle, but at least you can do it.

How can you check that you have been opted out and government really has no access to your private data? Think of government data stored permanently. Wnen you are opted out it is you who is opted out from access to your data, not the government. If you do not have effective means of control, your privacy most prodably will be abused without you knowing. There was quite a thread here last year about software engineer with a prison record. You simply cannot exercise right to forget. There is no way to get out of the digital prison.

You can't opt out of government tracking. The GP was talking about commercial tracking.

I got no means to check that either. What stops Google from opting me out of my data, but continue to sell or use it in the background?

Do any credit card services not do this? It's really unnerving to see recent purchases when browsing online.

Don't know of anyway to avoid this other than using cash. The speed the sharing takes place is pretty insane as well, I've made purchases of a new brand of X item at my local grocery chain only to have amazon suggest the exact item to me on the same day.

This sounds almost unbelievable. How sure are you that it wasn't suggested for some other reason? And how did they know WHAT you bought, given credit card companies don't get that info?

Agreed, I don't see how that's possible given the strict controls over personally identifiable card purchase data. Somebody would have to be breaking the law.

It's entirely possible they were going off of browsing history + where I bought from, but I've 100% had experiences where I appeared to see retargeted ads for same day purchases in brick and mortar stores. Perhaps they were joining through my credit card number only, which is also associated with my online profile?

Blur by Abine, albeit for online purchases only.

This could also be ad retargeting. You'll often see ads for things you looked at, but did not buy.

This is true. AMEX tried to sell me access to that data. That said, I'm not sure if it goes down to name/card number or if it's aggregate - we never bought it.

So on my statement, you see a random number of transactions for random amount, all from Amazon. I would rarely call it "surveillance at micro level" when you don't even know what I've bought.

Amazon knows what you bought though.

Those who have educated themselves about the Snowden leaks know that countries such as the US and the UK do by no means lag behind China, as far as mass surveillance is concerned.

are the transactions sold with the personal information? xyz bought these things this month. Seems hard to believe, although I'm sure they may do this after anonymizing the user's personal information.

This is exactly why Square exists: Data.

Which companies sell this data?

PNC's privacy policy allows for sharing/marketing use of debit card transaction data: https://www.pnc.com/content/dam/pnc-com/pdf/Privacy%20Policy...