Off the Grid

This is the grid I'm not on.

Being intensively secretive, I spend my life avoiding being tracked by the government and corporations. Not only is my name spelt wrongly in this blog (it's unlikely anyone could ever crack the encryption), but one of my main weapons is to pay for everything with cash. It's so convenient to use a credit card to pay for petrol, groceries, everyday shopping. But guess what? Banks and retailers and others can see exactly what you're doing and when. Their databases contain enough information to track your movements around town from one hour to the next. They can look for patterns in your activities and use predictive analytics to assign probabilties to your future purchases.

Even paying with cash is not enough to escape their attention though. Store loyalty cards are a crafty method used to entrap you. You may think that accumulating a few reward points each shop is the supermarket's attempt to reward you for choosing them. Nope. They want to build a profile of your spending patters for their market research. So ditch that rewards card, put away your credit card and come back to the 1950s with me. You'll thank me later.