I still remember my first purchase on Mercado Livre: a Cubieboard 2, valued at around 300 reais, at the time. It was the first of many online purchases.
Over the years, I've bought a little bit of everything — from various electronics to clothes. My last purchase was at the beginning of the month: three boxes of dark chocolate bars. I say "last" forever, because Mercado Libre closed my account against my will, after I tried for almost a month to request the closure of my Mercado Pago account due to excessive calls and other more delicate problems.
This time, the customer service representative was kind and tried to help, but informed me that there was nothing more to be done: I lost my account and the entire history of more than ten years of purchases. She was the only exception among so many terrible customer service representatives, both from Mercado Pago and other institutions. It's curious to see Mercado Libre invest millions in TV advertising while discarding a long-time customer as if they were just a number.
These ten years of shopping only matter to me; for them, the money I spent is just a statistic. Unfortunately, that's how companies treat their users. I only had accounts on three platforms: Mercado Livre, Amazon, and Magalu. Mercado Livre was the only one I actually used frequently and reliably; in a decade, I only had one tiny problem that I can barely remember.
On Amazon and Magalu, the experience was the opposite. On Amazon, I had problems right from my first purchase and never went back. On Magalu, I was starting to trust them, but the last two orders were wrong, which broke my trust. Now, taking advantage of the shock of Mercado Livre's closure, I'm going to close my accounts on the other marketplaces as well. After this experience, it will be difficult to trust any other platform again.
It's incredible how they try to sell the idea that they are a single company when, in fact, they operate differently. Mercado Pago and Mercado Livre have different natures, but the integration is a mess: you access Mercado Pago and, suddenly, you're redirected to the Mercado Livre website. This lack of visual and functional identity causes problems. In my case, when trying to cancel the financial service due to dissatisfaction, they ended up deleting my shopping account as a result.
This “sinister symbiosis” is not unique to them; Magalu does the same by creating accounts on MagaluPay without request, making it as difficult as possible to close them in order to force the customer to maintain both services. Companies that use their privilege in one sector to corner the consumer in another should be seriously questioned. For them, we are just numbers, but for us, it is our lives and our history that are disregarded.
I'm not religious, but I find it astonishing how certain people act—I don't know if it's out of coldness and calculation, or just like useful idiots. They're campaigning to pass a law that would force everyone to share biometric data today. The billionaire owners of these companies have been pursuing this for years to mine data and calculate behavioral patterns. This law should be unconstitutional, but everyone is on the payroll, everyone is part of the technofeudal system that treats people as numbers, just numbers. But this thing about putting your biometric data on everything seems a lot like the mark of the beast: you get marked. When you enter any website, even a new one, your history is already there; it reminded me a lot of an episode of Black Mirror.
Why am I citing the FELCA law? Now marketplaces are using dynamic pricing. Do you think that has nothing to do with it? You must be as much of a useful idiot as those who defend these control practices. These companies want your data to sell, an e-commerce platform that offers a different value to each person, based on their consumption on social networks. This scenario already exists, and with biometric data it becomes easier for them to consolidate it and make the symbiosis more macabre and sinister.
Ultimately, capitalism has become this: a dictatorship in which databases treat cold data and manipulate people as mere numbers.
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