You may also not feel comfortable with your bank or government knowing all of your private financial interactions. There is no reason to blindly trust your bank or government to that extent.
Well, not really free. There's a cost associated, but it may not be initially applied to the consumer. It makes it's way through in some way though, such as an increased service cost. The most transparent industry for this is likely gas stations, which in the U.S. at least (and even then I can only comment on the regions I've observed it), they will quote different prices per gallon for cash and for credit/debit, which is them pushing the cost through to the consumer transparently. This was actually disallowed by card processing agreements in the past, because card processors didn't want the fees hampering acceptance of charge cards.
Trade offs I guess.