4 ms·

I've lived in Sweden for nearly 10 years, and the whole cashless aspect is really something I've embraced. Cashless payments dominated even 10 years ago, but I'

I've lived in Sweden for nearly 10 years, and the whole cashless aspect is really something I've embraced. Cashless payments dominated even 10 years ago, but I've also seen a massive change in the past 2-3 years with places no longer accepting cash. Grocery shops still do, but most restaurants, takeout places and cafes are cashless. On the contrary, I find myself irritated in Germany where cash is required. The main thing I want to see is stronger privacy laws regarding transactions. There's some hope here with the EU. Data mining of purchase history should be banned outright for instance. That said, even though I'm privacy-concerned, I don't view cashless payments as one of the bigger threats. I refuse to own any store loyalty cards because they give the store an exact list of what I buy, tied to my identity, which is a much bigger privacy threat. My bank does know which grocery store I shop at, but that can be guessed with very high confidence anyway based on my address, which is public. I'd like to see Sweden at the forefront of developing cashless societies. The national bank is testing the platform a state-backed cryptocurrency. With the right combination of technological and legal mechanisms, that is very much something I would like to see.

mehrdadn 7y ago
What does a cashless society do when the power/internet/etc. goes out (whether due to a natural disaster or otherwise)?
- username90 7y ago
  Cash is not very useful if the power is out either, as for internet you just have to make it as reliable as power.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    > Cash is not very useful if the power is out either Sorry, what? I literally bought my lunch with cash the other day when the restaurant I went to had lost its power. Where do you pull these assertions from?
  - simplecto 7y ago
    Ask everyone living in South Florida post-hurricane. Cash is king.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
    You do realize that cash was in use before electricity as a utility was a thing, right? And that food is actually more critical for survival than electricity, right? And that you can exchange cash for food without electricity, right? And that blackouts is a thing that actually happens, right?
    - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
      Be nice to the Eloi.
- ACS_Solver 7y ago
  It's not that fragile, although it should of course be improved further. Payment terminals don't depend on constant connectivity, they can store transactions and send them to the bank later. Some of them, especially the ones used by smaller merchants, are battery-powered. If card terminals are unavailable completely, mobile payments should still work. So in my experience, the cashless society here can deal with such intermittent technical problems just fine. A lunch restaurant near my office had a total outage once, couldn't take any payments. Things worked out just fine on an honor system then - they wrote down names and amounts on paper, and asked people to pay in the next days. What doesn't work currently is resilience against long-lasting technical problems. If there's no power in an area for several days, there's no sensible way for the current cashless technologies to work.
shadowprofile77 7y ago
>I refuse to own any store loyalty cards because they give the store an exact list of what I buy, tied to my identity, which is a much bigger privacy threat. You're engaging in self delusion if you think the almost uniformly cashless payment systems you embrace in Sweden don't already cause this to be the case about you down to the minutest level: with your payments, where you make them, what you buy, when, and a very fine-grained general profile of your daily activities and movements (paying digitally in any phyiscal location obviously ties you to said location at a certain place and time). It's almost absurd that you even mention concerns about "potential" privacy invasions while claiming the system you live in is in any way a good thing, just because it's convenient. None of this is to mention the problems it could cause if some sort of major disaster occurs or a data breach somewhere in the chain causes part or all of your entire history of payments to become commodity data should anyone ever want to use it against you in some way.. Not to mention the potential future ramifications of paternalistic or authoritarian government policies being used to "guide" your buying habits and personal life through a near total capacity to access your purchase history, and then tying this to regulatory "incentives". It would be all too easy for a government to implement something like this under the right circumstances if the entire consumer economy is already cashless and run through large institutions. That you think this isn't a problem indicates a deep blindness to just how important fundamental privacy via untraceable payments on a basic level is to any society that does value a modicum of breathing space for a sincerely private life. Also, there's a vast margin of difference between some bank or other third party guessing where you shop with cash because of your address and them knowing exactly what you bought and where by (very easily) monitoring your digital payment activities.
- ACS_Solver 7y ago
  Unless I'm very wrong about the technical implementation, the data that the bank has is just the store where I shopped (merchant, card terminal) and the amount. They do not have data on what I bought, as in the data that's on the store's receipt. The store, on the other hand, only has the card number and not my name. This is where I see the need for legal protections. The store should not be allowed to keep that receipt info (item breakdown) for more than X days. They should not be allowed to transmit it at all. The bank should likewise not be allowed to engage in any data mining or forward that information anywhere. As for the broader privacy implication, that is something I would hope a national cryptocurrency addresses. While cash is anonymous, anonymity is not a property exclusive to cash. From my point of view, everything sucks about cash except anonymity - so, by a software analogy, it makes more sense to port anonymity to cashless systems than to maintain a legacy cash system.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
> The main thing I want to see is stronger privacy laws regarding transactions. There's some hope here with the EU. There is some hope here ... that there will be new rules to ignore? Like, how do you think such rules could ever be enforced effectively and in a way that the public can actually trust that it is being enforced effectively (to avoid chilling effects)? Plus, how do such rules prevent data leaks due to security problems? It's like you want to build a system that is maximally vulnerable to abuses and then just declare that using those vulnerabilities is theoretically not allowed instead of using the technology that we know reliably preevents all those problems. How isn't that completely naive at best? Next we'll remove all authentication from IT systems and just make it illegal to log into systems without authorization? How well do you think that would work?
- ACS_Solver 7y ago
  You build good systems with a combination of technical and legal measures, of course. Ban sharing of purchase data (legal measure) and also build systems to the data is encrypted with your on-card key (technical measure). It's no different from any other system. Violators need to be punished accordingly, but that's a broader failure in tech, that fines for abuse are very small. Of course legal restrictions don't work well without technical measures, but anything privacy-related is a social problem first and foremost, so it needs legal solutions in addition to the technical ones.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
    > You build good systems with a combination of technical and legal measures, of course. How is that "of course"? Not excluding one or the other a priori is one thing, but why would it be the obviously right choice to always use a combination of both? > Ban sharing of purchase data (legal measure) and also build systems to the data is encrypted with your on-card key (technical measure). How would that "encrypting with your on-card key" thing work? > Of course legal restrictions don't work well without technical measures, but anything privacy-related is a social problem first and foremost, so it needs legal solutions in addition to the technical ones. How does it follow that when you have a social problem, you need a legal solution? That seems like a complete non-sequitur to me.
jotm 7y ago
> places no longer accepting cash Is that legal? I believe in most countries national currency most be accepted in any form, by law...
- jfengel 7y ago
  It's not true in the US or the Eurozone. The "legal tender" requirement is for debts, not for purchases. A store can simply refuse to sell you the thing if you insist on paying cash. There are movements in both places to require merchants to accept cash, but I don't know of any countries that have adopted them yet. (Some cities in the US have.)
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    When you order food at a sit-down restaurant, you pay after you've eaten. In theory, that means such restaurants must accept cash.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Are you sure "debts" aren't a technical term here that encompasses all transactions? That's been my understanding. Whenever you buy something you take the item off of the shelf and are then in debt to the store until you settle it at the cash register.
- xorcist 7y ago
  Payments in national currency can be completely electronic of course. When cash is made sufficiently less used in society, and there are strong interests in this direction, cash is regarded as some sort of paper gift card for real money.
yxhuvud 7y ago
You probably don't need company cards anyhow, as you can probably tie your normal cash card to the company. And if they can track it for the people that want that, they can track you.

mehrdadn 7y ago

What does a cashless society do when the power/internet/etc. goes out (whether due to a natural disaster or otherwise)?

username90 7y ago
Cash is not very useful if the power is out either, as for internet you just have to make it as reliable as power.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  > Cash is not very useful if the power is out either Sorry, what? I literally bought my lunch with cash the other day when the restaurant I went to had lost its power. Where do you pull these assertions from?
- simplecto 7y ago
  Ask everyone living in South Florida post-hurricane. Cash is king.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  You do realize that cash was in use before electricity as a utility was a thing, right? And that food is actually more critical for survival than electricity, right? And that you can exchange cash for food without electricity, right? And that blackouts is a thing that actually happens, right?
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    Be nice to the Eloi.
ACS_Solver 7y ago
It's not that fragile, although it should of course be improved further. Payment terminals don't depend on constant connectivity, they can store transactions and send them to the bank later. Some of them, especially the ones used by smaller merchants, are battery-powered. If card terminals are unavailable completely, mobile payments should still work. So in my experience, the cashless society here can deal with such intermittent technical problems just fine. A lunch restaurant near my office had a total outage once, couldn't take any payments. Things worked out just fine on an honor system then - they wrote down names and amounts on paper, and asked people to pay in the next days. What doesn't work currently is resilience against long-lasting technical problems. If there's no power in an area for several days, there's no sensible way for the current cashless technologies to work.

shadowprofile77 7y ago

>I refuse to own any store loyalty cards because they give the store an exact list of what I buy, tied to my identity, which is a much bigger privacy threat. You're engaging in self delusion if you think the almost uniformly cashless payment systems you embrace in Sweden don't already cause this to be the case about you down to the minutest level: with your payments, where you make them, what you buy, when, and a very fine-grained general profile of your daily activities and movements (paying digitally in any phyiscal location obviously ties you to said location at a certain place and time). It's almost absurd that you even mention concerns about "potential" privacy invasions while claiming the system you live in is in any way a good thing, just because it's convenient. None of this is to mention the problems it could cause if some sort of major disaster occurs or a data breach somewhere in the chain causes part or all of your entire history of payments to become commodity data should anyone ever want to use it against you in some way.. Not to mention the potential future ramifications of paternalistic or authoritarian government policies being used to "guide" your buying habits and personal life through a near total capacity to access your purchase history, and then tying this to regulatory "incentives". It would be all too easy for a government to implement something like this under the right circumstances if the entire consumer economy is already cashless and run through large institutions. That you think this isn't a problem indicates a deep blindness to just how important fundamental privacy via untraceable payments on a basic level is to any society that does value a modicum of breathing space for a sincerely private life. Also, there's a vast margin of difference between some bank or other third party guessing where you shop with cash because of your address and them knowing exactly what you bought and where by (very easily) monitoring your digital payment activities.

ACS_Solver 7y ago
Unless I'm very wrong about the technical implementation, the data that the bank has is just the store where I shopped (merchant, card terminal) and the amount. They do not have data on what I bought, as in the data that's on the store's receipt. The store, on the other hand, only has the card number and not my name. This is where I see the need for legal protections. The store should not be allowed to keep that receipt info (item breakdown) for more than X days. They should not be allowed to transmit it at all. The bank should likewise not be allowed to engage in any data mining or forward that information anywhere. As for the broader privacy implication, that is something I would hope a national cryptocurrency addresses. While cash is anonymous, anonymity is not a property exclusive to cash. From my point of view, everything sucks about cash except anonymity - so, by a software analogy, it makes more sense to port anonymity to cashless systems than to maintain a legacy cash system.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago

> The main thing I want to see is stronger privacy laws regarding transactions. There's some hope here with the EU. There is some hope here ... that there will be new rules to ignore? Like, how do you think such rules could ever be enforced effectively and in a way that the public can actually trust that it is being enforced effectively (to avoid chilling effects)? Plus, how do such rules prevent data leaks due to security problems? It's like you want to build a system that is maximally vulnerable to abuses and then just declare that using those vulnerabilities is theoretically not allowed instead of using the technology that we know reliably preevents all those problems. How isn't that completely naive at best? Next we'll remove all authentication from IT systems and just make it illegal to log into systems without authorization? How well do you think that would work?

ACS_Solver 7y ago
You build good systems with a combination of technical and legal measures, of course. Ban sharing of purchase data (legal measure) and also build systems to the data is encrypted with your on-card key (technical measure). It's no different from any other system. Violators need to be punished accordingly, but that's a broader failure in tech, that fines for abuse are very small. Of course legal restrictions don't work well without technical measures, but anything privacy-related is a social problem first and foremost, so it needs legal solutions in addition to the technical ones.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  > You build good systems with a combination of technical and legal measures, of course. How is that "of course"? Not excluding one or the other a priori is one thing, but why would it be the obviously right choice to always use a combination of both? > Ban sharing of purchase data (legal measure) and also build systems to the data is encrypted with your on-card key (technical measure). How would that "encrypting with your on-card key" thing work? > Of course legal restrictions don't work well without technical measures, but anything privacy-related is a social problem first and foremost, so it needs legal solutions in addition to the technical ones. How does it follow that when you have a social problem, you need a legal solution? That seems like a complete non-sequitur to me.

jotm 7y ago

> places no longer accepting cash Is that legal? I believe in most countries national currency most be accepted in any form, by law...

jfengel 7y ago
It's not true in the US or the Eurozone. The "legal tender" requirement is for debts, not for purchases. A store can simply refuse to sell you the thing if you insist on paying cash. There are movements in both places to require merchants to accept cash, but I don't know of any countries that have adopted them yet. (Some cities in the US have.)
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  When you order food at a sit-down restaurant, you pay after you've eaten. In theory, that means such restaurants must accept cash.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Are you sure "debts" aren't a technical term here that encompasses all transactions? That's been my understanding. Whenever you buy something you take the item off of the shelf and are then in debt to the store until you settle it at the cash register.
xorcist 7y ago
Payments in national currency can be completely electronic of course. When cash is made sufficiently less used in society, and there are strong interests in this direction, cash is regarded as some sort of paper gift card for real money.

yxhuvud 7y ago

You probably don't need company cards anyhow, as you can probably tie your normal cash card to the company. And if they can track it for the people that want that, they can track you.