Hmm well, fair point. The society is moving also away from cash and many places don't accept it anymore. You are left with credit card... Which is also a spying device. So no payments without data collection for you!

I don't think that is essentially a bad thing. Forcing a digital signature for every transaction makes criminal activity difficult. Modern AML works much better because there is always a digital fingerprint for every transaction.

But I think that these are two distinct issues? Some crypto -things could somewhere in the future solve the privacy issue... But no society wants that, because real privacy makes criminal activity and money laundering possible. But that has nothing to do with credit card duopoly?