Sounds like Sweden. They are like that.

People generally agree that you should have privacy from your neighbors, yes. Not having that would have real consequences for people. Like it could affect what people think of you etc.

But often the discussion is about if the government should be able to snoop on your web traffic or if large corporations should be allowed to gather data about you so they can customize advertising.

It is a logically consistent position to be okay with Google accessing your phone’s data but not wanting your neighbor to have such access. No one is advocating the latter, so I think we need to sharpen our arguments. Otherwise we’re just making a strawman argument.

Thanks for sharing. I can definitely see how life can be better in a richer and more progressive place. I guess a major factor for choosing where to live should be whether people there are hopeful for the future.

Just curious, why do you prefer those countries over Japan? Anything lacking there?

The risk of the payment system getting shut down and people being unable to make payments for a while is real. And it is one good reason to be less reliant on digital payments.

But there is also the risk of bad actors, which could also be e.g. Russia, getting access to decades of payment history through a hack, if everything is digital. Having that data for every citizen of a country could enable efficient profiling of people in the country using big data analysis technologies.

The kind of thing you could find out with the transaction data is who are working in the military or security police, who is sympathetic to Russia and at the same time vulnerable to work with foreign governments, and potential blackmailing material relating to people in these or other groups. I’m sure the analysts working for the bad actor can come up with even more useful things to look for in the data.

There are of course a lot of other data sources that bad actors are interested in and that are easier to hack, but the financial history seems more comprehensive source of information than most other ones.

If you are using Mastercard in the US, Google will be getting transaction data all the same: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45368040