Is a 'No Cash' society a threat?

snowqueen555

Privacy is always a good thing, but I am wondering what are the dangers of having transactions recorded, most of our payments moreorless are recorded through our ban accounts as it is.

It is no different to the internet, everything can be traced, but there is safety in a crowd, and safety in the billions of transactions that happen daily.

Sanctioned_Parts_List

snowqueen555 wrote: »

It is no different to the internet, everything can be traced, but there is safety in a crowd, and safety in the billions of transactions that happen daily.

You can't rely on security in obscurity.

One of the ways to deal with, for example, the end to end encryption on WhatsApp, is traffic analysis. Watch the pattern of messages sent and received long enough and you can identify who I'm talking to, even if you don't know what I'm talking about. You can then perform some analysis on who these people are - if they the sort of people you'd expect somebody in my class/profession/social group to interact with, or, whether any of my network is suspected of some particular offence. RIPA already allows this today on general communication. It's problematic in that, i) it throws up a lot of false positives and ii) the police and security services are the only ones performing the analysis.

With money, the dataset is richer. At the moment with credit/debit cards, you are sending money to legitimate businesses. They're registered at Companies House, have contact details and have contracts with the point of sale/clearance companies. You also have a much wider financial network than you do a social network, and the banks themselves are constantly analysing your behaviour; this being how the anti-fraud systems work. So the bank can (with a warrant) confirm your spending patterns and normal behaviour, police powers can investigate the individuals on each end of the transaction, and you can find yourself linked to a person of interest. Again, this is technically possible already.

With digital cash, the ability to analyse your behaviour and financial/social network widens again. It becomes possible to expose everybody with whom you transact. This is fine if the other party is a drug dealer and you genuinely do have a cocaine habit - you'd deserve the attention. Less so if the other person is a cocaine dealer, who also just happens to be your window cleaner.

In both situations, you'd probably rather that evidence of that financial relationship didn't exist at all.