When I got my Logitech mouse, after the driver got installed, the first thing it introduced me with is to synchronise the setting by setting up an account.
Years down the line, I got a Razer mouse and it needs another account of the same kind.

In Indian services and storefronts, mostly they get satisfied with just your number. Some of them spam your SIM messages with offers, notifications, etc while others spam the WhatsApp (if it exists). The issue where it can cause an issue is: numbers often get transferred from people to people, officially or unofficially, so you can fall in a legal trouble if the previous owner was involved in an illegitimate activity; although I am not aware if it ever happened on a large scale.

Although not a large user of it: login with Google/some other platform could be a better option?

Grzyb wrote on 2024-11-25, 07:27:

Oh yeah, I've recently been to some food store - and at the cash register got asked "Do you have the app?"
It turned out that prices vary depending if you've got the app...

if you get slightly lower prices you pay in "data" instead. Actually 'big' data, ie finding price optimization opportunities at an individual level is happening to some extent now, enable by vast data collection and mining, with AI doing some of the work. Almost all these "sign up" products are trying to get data about you in order to get more money later

The overall 'goal' is to try and get you to spend exactly the highest amount you would be willing to spend while the person next to you might spend more or less

in the present this has been around as "surge pricing" or dynamic pricing for quite a while, e.g. meals, travel, hotels at peak times being higher priced than equivalents at non peak times and its becoming more nuanced - we already see that different people can pay different prices for exactly the same hotel or journey depending on apparently external factors like who you book through and whether certain mystery discount codes are applied.

how about if you buy a new TV though, and you would pay $500 but the person next to you would only pay $400 and the company would allow both.

naturally you'd be upset - but what if the price difference wasn't that much, say $50, and it was all muddled up in apparently unconnected vouchers, codes, discounts, etc all of which seem at first glance to be unconnected and you may shrug and buy at $500 while the guy next to you, equally unsure about why, buys at $450. Welcome to the future of AI/big data driven maximal price extraction, all "hidden" by nonsense gimmick discount variances to keep you in the dark while it actually just calculates what you might be willing to pay and then pushes you to it.

A future in which no one will ever feel they got a bargain again, because every price will be maxed out to your personal probable limit, every purchase will be close to the point where you wouldn't buy it

gerry wrote on 2024-11-25, 13:41:

in the present this has been around as "surge pricing" or dynamic pricing for quite a while

And that's why we avoid posting links to Ebay auctions 🤣

A lot of this isn't new. Razer did this as far back as 2017 and probably a few years before that. But it wouldn't put me off a Razer Naga, I love that mouse.

ratfink wrote on 2024-12-08, 17:39:

A lot of this isn't new. Razer did this as far back as 2017 and probably a few years before that. But it wouldn't put me off a Razer Naga, I love that mouse.

As long as all features of a given device are available without any online account - and even in a totally offline setup - there's indeed no reason to avoid that device.

Grzyb wrote on 2024-12-08, 21:41:

ratfink wrote on 2024-12-08, 17:39:

A lot of this isn't new. Razer did this as far back as 2017 and probably a few years before that. But it wouldn't put me off a Razer Naga, I love that mouse.

As long as all features of a given device are available without any online account - and even in a totally offline setup - there's indeed no reason to avoid that device.

There's always someone with, "I have paid 120 USD, will I be missing something out?"

I agree this is completely out of hand
And I am becoming increasingly resistant to it
See this - this is CASH. You don't need ANY information about me. You don't need my phone number. You don't need my email. You don't need my street address.
Every "account" that you have is another way you information can be stolen

Purchased something yesterday, got my item and a receipt and then asked me for my phone number, I just told them a bunch of random numbers.
Lets face it, sales assistant is just doing a job. They don't really care either way and can do without the hassle of someone complaining especially this time of year.

The most frustrating thing about the retail email receipt thing is that credit cards have, for many years, been capable of storing an email address for exactly this purpose. You probably have one that already does this.

Ideally the cashier would never have to ask you to spell it out, and the retailer would never have access to that address themselves. You could just get your receipts automatically emailed to you directly at point of sale, just through using contactless payment. It's possible other countries have managed to make this happen already, and you may have experienced this with a smaller/indy shop.

The reason this hasn't taken off where I live is that they know how much their customers would fuss about it "having my data" or generally make a mess of a process designed to make everything simpler.

So we're stuck with a halfway-solution that is the worst of all worlds. Huzzah.