The account request that changed it all
For a long time, I had been using a card wallet to store my multiple cards. Supermarket, libraries, different retailers, there were cards for everything and to not carry dozens of them, I uploaded them to this app. All worked fine, in the beginning. But after several years of service, it got acquired by a big player on the digital payments sector… And so the enshitification began, at least for me.
It started with shop’s advertising. They pushed news,ads and promotion of the different stores to the application. They created some kind of “stories”, as every other social network. They started to nudge to use their payment services, their payment cards and so on. This was still bearable, until the moment they pushed for an account creation. That was it. These are my cards, my data, that was already being exploited by the shops, I know, but also used for some public libraries and other organisations that do not use my data at all. I am pretty sure their app was already cross-referencing my different purchases and card usage to sell it. But the fact that they request an account creation, it was too much. It made my frustration to attain its limit. Why do you need my email address and other personal data to let me use my data?
Catima to the rescue
Thankfully, someone told me about Catima. “A loyalty and ticket management for Android.” The best part, “Catima doesn’t require internet access, shows no ads and doesn’t share any data. That makes it the perfect solution.” Their words. What’s best? it is open source so it is possible to actually look the code and verify that their claims are true!
So I installed it.
Migrating data
The application worked great, but I had an issue. Migrating my cards. Of course, the old application didn’t have an export cards button (which Catima has). So it was not straightforward to transfer my cards. That’s a common issue. Even if it is your data, it can be trapped by external parties. And even if you can recover it, it may not be on a standard format that’s easy to work with. For data exploiters, this is an strategic decision, as they really want to keep their edge over what they have captured.
In this case it was not that difficult to find a workaround. A bit boring, but still fine. Catima can scan codes from the camera, so I made print-screen of my cards from the other app and started to scan them again. I could have done it with the physical ones, but most of them were destroyed or are purely digital.
Using the app
What can I say? it does what it is supposed to do. And that’s it. No pushed ads, no data extraction and exploitation (at least by the app, the shop will still keep doing it). It is simple, no unneeded functionalities. Delivering the value. So I started to use it and uninstalled the old application. I also requested my account to be deleted and my data to be completely removed from their services and databases. Which based on RGPD, I am hoping they actually did it.
Conclusions
Data exploitation is a real thing. Data ownership too. This experience made me realise that I was getting too confortable about them. And reinforce my love for open source and free software. Let’s regain control, step by step.
Resources
If you want to know more about Catima, you can check their website https://catima.app or their repository https://github.com/CatimaLoyalty.