I limit my credit card information sharing as much as the privacy preferences allow, but I'm not about to give up hundreds or thousands of dollars a year in value because Google might show me an ad I won't click on anyway.
The value of the credit card point is about 2% best case. Points exist to create a fomo attachment to the card.
I’d love to see a well done research paper to get a sense of the expected value of cash vs credit.
Before I only had smaller amounts on my debit card, so if I wanted to buy stuff online I had to first move money from another account. This extra step made me more conscious of my spending and I would imagine starting to use cash would have a similar effect.
This is the reason that you didn't buy a $20 XBox game, you brought a game with 1,700 Microsoft points.
You don't buy this skin for a game for $14, that's way too expensive! Who would pay that! However when it's on sale for 3,200 Riot points? That's a great deal!
If you wanted to strike a death blow to the micropayments industry you'd just need to force them to put the actual monetary price against each loot box/gem bundle/whatever rather than obscuring it with a made up currency that nobody can evaluate cost against.
With cash I check my wallet, and think “that’s $50, I have $300, and need to go shopping and get gas later”.
Just the act of reconciling what I have on hand defers many purchases. And deferrals stop many from happening!
That said, I’m not a caveman and have a credit card. I just don’t use it without planning or having an emergency/unplanned event.
Advertising is generally an attack on subconscious cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are famously nearly undetectable by the user of the brain even if they are aware of the bias, and, just as famously, brain users find themselves fully convinced that the bias must not be present if they cannot detect it.
We have all the knowledge to tell us that we are very unlikely to be an exception, that we are almost certainly being personally manipulated by advertising, and yet our experience so powerfully tells us that we are immune that we simply don't believe it.
Banks fought heavily against this law, of course.
https://lawpay.com/about/blog/can-you-charge-a-fee-or-surcha...
(disclosure: I used to work for a sister company of LawPay)
I’ve been lucky to be on some promotion where I can pay my rent for free using a credit card, so usually I just do that or buy prepaid Visa cards, which then isn’t tied to my identity when I transact with it.