Hello? What are you talking about? "cost of not participating"? Are you really afraid of no longer being able to buy food or clothing without Facebook and Twitter?

Planet Earth may well run out of food to feed us all, but Facebook and Twitter are quite irrelevant when it comes to essential needs.

If you are trolling, congrats, I for one fell for your scam.

If on the other hand you truly care about "discounts", consider for a moment the possibility that you are deluded. A discount is nothing more than just a trick to lure customers. If you don't understand this, don't bother. Just spend all your money on discounts and be merry. It's the Merrycan Dream I believe. ;-)

That is why I have three different customer loyalty cards for a local supermarket chain. One I use for beer, one for frozen pizza and the third for Oreos.

Do I ever need all three at once? No, I am very organised. Besides, I *only* ever use a loyalty card when there is actually a discount to be had by using it. I would be very suspicious if there was always a discount with the card, it means they are ripping you off. And I don't shop when I know they are a rip-off.

This may be a bit of a stretch for the original poster, but if the intention is to lock down the desktop why not abolish it all together and put it all on the server using thin clients?