Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

Yeah it isn’t as accurate as the privacy-invasive kind of tracking, since students and seniors can be wealthy and eligibility for welfare benefits doesn’t always consider assets or gifts from well-off family. But it’s accurate enough to give the economy most of the same benefit without the privacy downside.

I do think it’s fine for people to opt in to more tracking as a separate consent choice beyond merely participating in a loyalty program, for example to get more personalized and therefore more useful offers, but not as a condition of participation to merely receive at least standard offers and accumulate points. That’s how they generally work in Germany.

Sounds like that'll push retailers to switch from a system where they give points/discounts to everyone, to one where points/discounts are "targeted", which of course requires opting into tracking. Like I said before, the whole premise of loyalty programs is that you're being tracked in exchange for rewards. You really can't expect to have your cake (discounts) and eat it too (not being tracked).

my grandmother collected green stamps from the grocery store, which she saved for food discounts.. I don't think that there was any customer ID involved at all..

honestly, describing pervasive tracking of purchasing associated with govt ID as "normal" is .. its a sickness and parts of it are illegal now. It is not required or "normal" at all, from this view

As I said, in Germany you can indeed have your cake and eat it too in this regard, if you’re okay with the offers you receive being less targeted and therefore less appealing.

My understanding is that GDPR requires them to offer the option to decline the personalized targeting without being blocked from participation overall, and this is probably the same anywhere in the EU. But I don’t have personal experience with this in other EU countries and could be misunderstanding.

The "cake" in this case refers to the offers you had before GDPR came into effect and/or regulators started enforcing it. They might give opt-out people some token offers to appease regulators, but I doubt it'll be anywhere close to the offers they had before.

It’s not an opt-out situation. As per GDPR requirements, these programs have a specific opt-in prompt for personalized targeting, separate from the one which is for generally collecting and redeeming points as a member, and it’s not pre-chosen by default.

I think one can assume that many people will decline to opt in, especially in a culturally privacy-focused country like modern Germany and since not opting in is far behaviorally common than explicitly opting out, but also that many others will knowingly consent in exchange for the benefits. So I think they would generally want to give decent offers to both categories of people, since the non-consent group is large enough to matter. Of course the personalized ones would be better, otherwise nobody would want to give that consent.

Myself, I’ve consented to some but not all of the personalized targeting and information sharing from the loyalty programs I participate in here, after reading the descriptions of the requested consents in detail and making a conscious choice. In at least one case I converted a no to a yes after thinking about it longer. It’s good to have that transparency and control, and not to have the legalese surreptitiously remove your right to sue the store should that become necessary as is common in the US (forced arbitration is generally illegal here in B2C agreements).

As for the rest of your most recent comment, I wouldn’t know; I didn’t ever live in Europe before the GDPR.