The existence of the record is inevitably linked to the ability for it to be used in legal actions or criminal investigations.
However, the ability to use that record for literally every other purpose, and especially for it to be sold for marketing purposes, can be and should be made totally illegal by appropriate banking secrecy regulations. If that's not the case in USA, well, that should be fixable - there are countries in which anyone in the bank doing that would be literally a felony.
We need stronger privacy laws to stop these activities rather than trying to circumvent them ourselves. There are plenty of ways to track people (tracking cell phones via bluetooth beacons and wifi network pings, for example) even when credit cards aren't used.
> We need stronger privacy laws to stop these activities rather than trying to circumvent them ourselves.
This assumes that the government can be trusted to care about the citizen's privacy. This is an assumption that at least cypherpunks explicitly do not share. Just find some case involving terrorism or child abuse (depending on the political climate), and new surveillance laws will become passed.
The point is that the very design of Bitcoin forces the entire transaction history of the medium into every hand that uses it (and can be obtained by anyone who wishes to examine it).
You can pass all the laws that you want, but that will not change unless you redesign it.
I was thinking the other day about how much about me could be easily inferred by my credit card purchase history, both good and bad. Hitch it up into ML and sort me into good and bad buckets for insurance or advertising. It already has been happening I'm sure.
This record is subject to subpoenas in legal actions against you.
This record can also be sold for marketing purposes to generate personalized advertising for you.
Be aware of this movement of your personal information.