Cash Whenever Possible

I despise "targeted marketing" and having "behavioral data" collected on me. The banner and margin ads (I've not seen a pop up since I started using Mozilla) I've seen over the years, have on very few occasions - fewer than I can count on one hand in 4 years - been something I actually intentionally clicked on. I've always said, since my college days, that 'awesome products sell themselves'. Now, with broad band, friendly searching tools, and a few neurons to rub together, it's remarkably easy to find whatever you want online. In my opinion, advertisers are more or less, obsolete. I don't need them, I don't want them, and I resent their intrusion in my and my family's lives. They're just something to be bypassed on my DVR, blocked on my ad-block-plus, and circumvented in my selective internet browsing.

I always understood that credit card companies, ISPs, gaming sites, employers, and anywhere that a person's electronic signature can be traced, tracked, monitored, can and will mine and leverage that data as they please. But listening to the radio today, and hearing about how credit card companies raise people's rates when they shop at thrift stores, pay for marriage counseling, pay bar tabs, get massages, or any of 1000s of other things that some narrow minded pin headed actuary MBA somewhere decided is statistically more likely to lead to a person not paying their bill... I found that to be despicable. I know that Dr Desert Flower and I have already been targeted because we 'live in a region of high foreclosure rates' - so as one of our credit cards informed us in writing that they'll be more than doubling our interest rate on new purchases, we informed them in writing to cancel the card, and we will no longer be doing business with them.

I have no patience, no tolerance, no interest in feeding more personal data into the ravenously hungry and sore-misguided marketing whores' toothy maws. Cash, whenever possible, going forward.