Cash is no silver bullet. Even if you buy with cash only, you can and will still be profiled. Cameras can identify you automatically, track you around the shop, know which ads you react to, etc. It's already going on.
Nothing ever is a silver bullet, which was sort of my point.
I was responding to “the only way to break the circle is to purchase with cash”, which just is not enough if your goal is to not end up in a database with your buying behaviour tabulated and analysed. Better? Clearly. But it is neither sufficient nor necessary to break the circle.
Honestly, these days the only way to avoid ending up in someone's database somewhere is to go 100% off grid. While that's still technically feasible, it's becoming more and more difficult to do, and it's still not an absolute guarantee. There are cameras in supposedly "off grid" campsites, and cell towers pretty much everywhere.
