Do you have a right to anonymous money?
Mar. 21st, 2014 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackSmall cash transactions are mostly anonymous. Now that electronic payments (debit card, credit card, oyster card, paypal, etc) are becoming much more common, transactions are less anonymous by default.
This is fine, provided the company keeps the records internally and doesn't use it for anything. But once it exists, it's very easy for it to leak. Eg. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ describes a supermarket data-mining purchase history, determining which purchases might correlate with being pregnant, and sending pregnancy-related special-offers to their home address without checking that (for instance) their parents might not know and not approve.
One of the reasons I was interested in crypto-currencies in the first place is that they provide a way to make "cash" payments electronically. That hasn't necessarily worked out so well. But now it occurs to me, that may be a bit of a red-herring. Anonymous pre-paid credit cards provide anonymity, and already exist.
It's just not a common way of buying things. And normally has to connect back to your real identity somewhere. (Eg. if you have to prove your age to see something, you may have to inadvertently prove your identity as well, and large organisations and governments may prefer to err on the side of people proving their identity often.)
Large transactions should not be anonymous, because the government has to detect tax evasion and money laundering. Right? (Although governments do seem to be getting more greedy with what they have a right to do.)
But what about small transactions? Is non-anonymity ok? Or should they be anonymous technically? Or should it be a hitherto-unrecognised right that companies you buy things from should not be able to record which transactions were made by the same person?
This is fine, provided the company keeps the records internally and doesn't use it for anything. But once it exists, it's very easy for it to leak. Eg. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ describes a supermarket data-mining purchase history, determining which purchases might correlate with being pregnant, and sending pregnancy-related special-offers to their home address without checking that (for instance) their parents might not know and not approve.
One of the reasons I was interested in crypto-currencies in the first place is that they provide a way to make "cash" payments electronically. That hasn't necessarily worked out so well. But now it occurs to me, that may be a bit of a red-herring. Anonymous pre-paid credit cards provide anonymity, and already exist.
It's just not a common way of buying things. And normally has to connect back to your real identity somewhere. (Eg. if you have to prove your age to see something, you may have to inadvertently prove your identity as well, and large organisations and governments may prefer to err on the side of people proving their identity often.)
Large transactions should not be anonymous, because the government has to detect tax evasion and money laundering. Right? (Although governments do seem to be getting more greedy with what they have a right to do.)
But what about small transactions? Is non-anonymity ok? Or should they be anonymous technically? Or should it be a hitherto-unrecognised right that companies you buy things from should not be able to record which transactions were made by the same person?
no subject
Date: 2014-03-21 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-21 02:02 pm (UTC)It's not anonymous, but the Orange Cash card just costs a fixed £5 fee, and can then be topped up by fee-free by bank transfer, or by cash at EE stores (so no paper trail), and offers 1% back as PAYG credit.
I don't think there aren't any cheap truely-anonymous cards, though (£3.95 fee for a £50 card is the best I know of).
no subject
Date: 2014-03-21 01:46 pm (UTC)(I think small credit card transactions should be anonymous, too, but that train left the bottle long ago.)
Tills and reaping what we sow
Date: 2014-03-22 09:56 am (UTC)But what happens to the banknote after that? It's now a used note, and untraceable until it's issued to an identifiable bank customer - which means a card transaction at an ATM or by a retailer's cashback.
Coins, of course, are never traceable: there's no 'issuance' transaction to an identifiable individual.
Now for the tin-foil-hatted bit.
I'm assuming issuance at a bank or by a card 'cashback' is the only transaction that links the cash to the individual. Store loyalty cards do, too, when cash is paid and change is handed back. But identifying individuals in a video surveillance environment is possible by facial recognition: it would take a considerable development effort to get this hooked up to an feed from an RFID reader and the retailer's checkout, but it's possible and foreseeable.
It occurs to me that we should ask if any retailers are already routinely identifying their customers this way. They definitely use surveillance video to
ID-check people entering their stores against lists of known shoplifters.
My guess is that linking people to their RFID-tagged cash transactions by facial recognition would have a very low accuracy: lots of false matches, lots of no-match failures. It would be of little use for targeted surveillance.
However, the power of big data sets means that a test with accuracy in the low single-digit percentages will yield usable information when you have a database with millions of transactions.
In short, tagged cash is useless for a targeted security operation, but it is a tool that will yield useful and intrusive information in a society that tolerates pervasive mass surveillance and the free exchange of captured data.