They're not exclusive anymore. The credit card is largely just a physical application that the phone can do anyways. Every modern phone can be a credit card. Besides, when leaving your home you likely take the big 3 collectively: cell, wallet, keys.
Credit cards have NFC now. It wouldn't be hard to fathom that this data might be paired with other surveillance data.
Everywhere we look, someone is trying to create a new method of tracking. ISPs are high-jacking sessions, 3rd party apps on your phone are taking everything they can get their hands on, "smart-home" products that are always listening, shopper club cards, toll-transponders tracked silently by municipalities (off of toll roads!), license plate scanners, CCTV with facial recognition.
Everything is being collected. To what end? At some point, we have to hit peak-marketing where this data becomes mostly useless as our behavior will be perfectly predictable at some point in the future.
> toll-transponders tracked silently by municipalities (off of toll roads!)
Hadn't heard of that before. Gross. Although I can see it being helpful in answering some planning questions. Take Seattle with two competing bridges, 520 (toll) and I-90 (no toll). How do rates/congestion effect which bridge commuters take?
I wish this stuff was made more clear. Unfortunately, with license plate readers everywhere, it's just becoming more and more a given that your car gets tracked through major intersections/choke points. While it's going to vary what people do with that data, it's pretty safe to say someone is holding onto their share of it long-term.
Police drive around neighborhoods with the ALPRs and keep that database. WIFI and bluetooth beacons are setup at major events and along interstates. SF Bay area tracked their Fastrack for years.
Big Brother is here and has matured into Big Daddy ;)
There's an entire industry dedicated to traffic analysis and selling government these services. Some places are even privatizing toll-roads. The state is using eminent domain to take land, taking out loans and issuing bonds to build the roads, and letting private contractors 'operate' the roads perpetually. If that wasn't bad enough, the state guarantees the private operators a minimum amount of revenue in case there isn't enough traffic to meet some minimum threshold. Essentially, all the same problems as privatized prisons.
