A bookstore owner writes about how her bookstore has continued to operate…as a surveillance system.

She presents this as a story of triumph over adversity, disregarding the implications of imposing surveillance on all purchases. For me, this outcome is perverse and alarming. Paying for a book with a credit card tracks people and what they read. So does shipping it to the customer.

I won't give a store any information that could identify me, and especially not a bookstore. So until there is a store that lets me enter, browse, pay cash, and take the book away, I won't buy a book from a bookstore. If bookstores "survive" by converting themselves into collectors of data, all of which is available to the FBI without a warrant under the law Biden helped write, they will become part of the problem.

Can we count on them to let people pay cash again some day?