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I'm Swedish and this stuff makes me really worried. Especially since the main way for two people to exchange small amounts of money is through a proprietary app

I'm Swedish and this stuff makes me really worried. Especially since the main way for two people to exchange small amounts of money is through a proprietary app that uses a proprietary ID system (owned by a for-profit company) that only runs on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. I really hope this trend dies off, a cash-less society is a terrible idea. I will say, however, that buses not taking cash is perfectly fine. They use NFC/RFID ticket cards which can't identify you. Not being able to buy tickets with cash is a little less fine.

dtech 7y ago
You will always have vendor neutral payments with bank transactions, which are EU wide and regulated with SEPA. Don't know about Sweden, but in the Netherlands that's widely supported and free for consumers. What's the harm in people using a proprietary app on top of that that has slightly more convenience?
- johnlorentzson 7y ago
  Because it's become a standard that almost everyone is expected to use.
  - tyfon 7y ago
    We got a system in Norway called Vipps for small transactions that I refuse to take part in but it seems like 99% of the rest of the population are using it. I've yet to have anyone refuse to pay me via direct bank transfer or me paying them in this way when I ask and explain why I don't use Vipps.
    - 2rsf 7y ago
      > explain why I don't use Vipps please explain. direct bank transfers are still slow (same bank) to unacceptable (different banks) for most payments
      - pimterry 7y ago
        In general, within the EU, this is rapidly improving. > still slow (same bank) SEPA instant credit transfer is standardized since 2017 and supported by > 50% of banks & payment providers (https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-instant-credit-transfer https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...). If both parties support that then bank transfers take under 10 seconds. If that's not supported somehow classic SEPA transfers work everywhere, and arrive in 1 business day max. 1 day isn't something you can use in a shop of course, but if you need to pay back a friend it's pretty acceptable imo. > unacceptable (different banks) Not accepting IBANs or SEPA payments from other banks or from banks in other EU countries is illegal, and comes with substantial fines. It still happens in places of course, especially in slow moving large orgs, but if you still find organizations doing this nowadays then you can report them as breaching EU payment regulations (https://eba.europa.eu/consumer-corner/how-to-complain https://eba.europa.eu/consumer-corner/how-to-complain) and that should set a fire under things pretty quickly.
        fauigerzigerk 7y ago
        >If that's not supported somehow classic SEPA transfers work everywhere, and arrive in 1 business day max. Right, but one business day will often be two days during the week and four days over the weekend, because many banks set an arbitrary cut-off time after which they will no longer process any payments. One bank I use will process payments received after 12:00 pm (lunchtime) on the next day. So the money will arrive two days later, unless it's a Friday, in which case the money arrives on Tuesday.
        mixmastamyk 7y ago
        Keep a full paycheck spare and then never have to worry about it again.
      - tyfon 7y ago
        Vipps has very poor validation of money transfers and there has been a lot of fraud already where people craft Vipps messages that look like official transfers and then tell people that they send money wrong and ask them to send it back. It is very hard to rectify things like that. A bank will tell me if I enter the account number wrong at least and show me the name of the account holder before I press send, with Vipps you just go without validation. Direct bank transfers in Norway can be made instantly for a tiny fee, but personally I have yet to be in a situation where that is required.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  The question is: Can you interoperate without using the proprietary app? Facebook also builds on the internet and the web, but you can not interoperate with Facebook without becoming a Facebook user. And "interoperate" means that you can use an alternative while the other party does not (i.e., you are not dependent on the other party's cooperation in order to be able to use an alternative). But also, in any case it's still a bad idea because the payment provider has the ability to just disobey your payment orders, and regulation doesn't help with that but rather potentially makes it even more likely "for security reasons". Payment providers use secret methods to decide whether your payment order is considered a security risk and then will prevent you from spending your own money based on their secret decision making process, or at least make you jump through unpredictable hoops before they allow you to spend your own money. That's a major security risk for you, in addition to all the security risks due to the well-known terrible IT security practices of banks as well as/in combination with the privacy risks of leaving a digital trail of your locations and purchases.
ksec 7y ago
>I really hope this trend dies off, a cash-less society is a terrible idea.... Exactly. We could get rid of coins, and replace it with an electronic variant and leave paper cash alone. I am all for contactless payment, but I want the option to use cash. The only thing that guarantees privacy. And this is especially true in places without democracy, as shown in the Hong Kong Protest.
- smichel17 7y ago
  A few years ago I would have agreed with you, but spending time in Germany has changed my view on coins. See, in the US, coins are kind of useless on their own. You can't pay for anything with only coins, so giving exact change is always an extra step on top of paying with cash. Ugh. But in the EU, they have €1 and €2 coins, and it's difficult to overstate how much this changes the dynamic. It means that for purchases under ~€10, it's suddenly possible to pay with coins only. It also means that for cash purchases, you can often receive your change as, well, change. So for large purchases, I'll pay with cash only and receive change, which goes in my coin pouch, and for small purchases I'll give exact change in coins only, using them up. This actually becomes less onerous than paying exclusively with bills, like I do in the US, because you use up your coins naturally instead of collecting them in a jar or something to be counted later. It also helps that taxes are included in the price label, so a €5.99 purchase will yield €0.01 instead of something in the vicinity of $0.75.
  - hexl 7y ago
    He didn't literally mean coins, it's cash what He was talking about.
    - Hasnep 7y ago
      They made the distinction between coins and paper cash: > We could get rid of coins, and replace it with an electronic variant and leave paper cash alone.
  - robert_foss 7y ago
    Being a Swede, who now lives in Germany I would say that there must be a middle ground between the extreme cash dependency of Germany and the opposite in Sweden. I have no idea how you do your shopping and end up not getting a pool of useless 1/5 cent coins. People literally laugh you in the face if you try to purchase things with them. Your only option is to give them away or collect them in a jar. And needing to constantly go to ATMs just to keep notes on you is kind of ridiculous. However I've also been to card only restaurants in Sweden when the card network was down. There was no plan B, the payment interaction just fell apart.
rlv-dan 7y ago
> buses not taking cash is perfectly fine I guess, if you are ok with leaving an electronic trail whereever you go...
- johnlorentzson 7y ago
  The tickets have no way of identifying you unless you register on their website. You could always just get rid of your card and get a new one when you want to.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    They can't identify you, provided that they don't pair that data up with anything else. Eg just a few trips where you didn't turn your phone location off on the bus would be enough to know which card is yours. Even if you turn your location off every other time it wouldn't matter. Or your phone service provider can do that even with your location set to off. Don't the plastic cards cost extra?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - paublyrne 7y ago
      If they can track your phone surely how you pay for the trip is neither here nor there.
  - jalk 7y ago
    How do you add money to the card? Here in Denmark we have a similar thing, but the only way to top up your card anonymously is through cash. Or do you have prepaid throwaway cards?
    - 2rsf 7y ago
      Yes, prepaids and possibly cash
  - ulzeraj 7y ago
beefield 7y ago
> I really hope this trend dies off, a cash-less society is a terrible idea. I fully understand that my opinion is both unintuitive and deeply disliked by many if not most people, so I can only ask you to spend some time thinking if you really have thought this through. Anyway, I believe there are realistic scenarios where it is good for the economy and society to have negative interest rates imposed by central banks. Cash is one of the things that prohibits this, thus we need to get rid of cash. At the same time we definitely need privacy respecting payment methods. Thus we would likely need to develop some kind of physical tokens/coins/notes/whatever whose value is time dependent. Biggest problem here is that the amount of people who simultaneously understand the need of negative rates and privacy respecting payment systems seems to be for all practical purposes pretty close to zero, so I am not holding my breath here.
- pb82 7y ago
  I'm skeptic. Forcing people to buy crap they don't need by denying them ways to store cash will probably increase some numbers in some spreadsheets. But is it really a net positive for society? Or are there other reasons that I didn't consider like more people seeking investment options like the stock market?
  - 74ls00 7y ago
    From the long term view, it seems reasonable to assume that the high economic growth rates of the 20th century are not going to be something we’ll see again anytime soon. An environmentally-sustainable economic outlook for the future is likely to see long period of close to 0% growth, and more frequent periods of negative growth. Environmentally-sustainable economics seems like a net positive for society, and at this point, an almost necessity.
  - beefield 7y ago
    Well, not "forcing"[1] people buying crap today makes the people creating the crap jobless and yes, that has a real cost for society. first because the jobless do not create value and second because someone needs to pay their unemployment benefits. [1] Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You can voluntarily choose to lend your money to the bank if you agree with the interest rate. If you do not, you are free to do as you please with your money. Find someone who is willing to pay better interest rates (typically more risky)[2], buy crap, or even buy bitcoin or gold. [2] Interesting question is, why society should guarantee you a return[3] on your investments if you do not yourself find a counterparty that is willing to pay you high enough return that you are happy with? Smells awfully lot like socialism to me. [3] And why this guaranteed return needs to be exactly 0%? Why not 5%?
andrepd 7y ago
Like many things (social networking, digital AI assistants, keyboard text prediction) they are creepy because they are closed-off and proprietary and you have fuck all idea what's happening with your data, besides vaguely knowing you're being monitored in a way Orwell could only dream of. Once you take out the fact that e.g. messages you write are being recorded, your speech is being monitored 24/7 by a microphone in your home, or all your text input is being stored in somebody's server halfway across the world, those technologies could have the potential to be really neat indeed. One can dream.
alkonaut 7y ago
The proprietary id is at least co-owned by all the major consumer banks, so it's slightly better than it being just some random small company. I'd prefer if it was a government operation of course, especially since now almost all contact with authorities goes through this system. The right thing to do would be to create a publicly owned e-ID and electronic cash, and replace the reliance on BankID and credit cards.
- askesum 7y ago
  As a Trisquel user I am completely excluded from this system.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    As far as I’m aware all Linux users are out of luck. Buying a cheap used android phone for BankID is probably the easiest solution.
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
Societies are imperfect and have a huge inertia, they need grey areas for compensating for those imperfections. Cash is a way into those grey areas. So that you can not have a phone, or be a hobo, be off the grid, go to a gay bar without leaving a trace, hold a controversial artistic/polical/religious event, let a beaten spouse organize an escape, mess around as a kid without your parents always knowing everything, try a product the state doesn't approve of and so on.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
> They use NFC/RFID ticket cards which can't identify you. Pretty easy to ping these cards and any wireless ID (IMSI, WiFi MAC). Enough hits and the correlations will easily fall in to place.
atyppo 7y ago
I'm not Swedish -- how is this being accomplished? By way of legislation? Here in NYC, Metrocard data can be obtained by LE or the DA. A new fare payment system currently being implemented is presumably even easier to track people.
bryal 7y ago
At least Open Banking (PSD2) will allow for third party alternatives to Swish and banking apps. Maybe even open-source applications will become possible, but getting a PSD2 license as an open-source developer may be tricky.
PeterStuer 7y ago
It is terrible, but it will not die off. There has been incredible lobbying for this. This is the ultimate capitalist's wet dream: making a profit on every transaction. The privacy angle is tangential, just collateral in the land-grab, just one more way to squeeze the last drop of profit out of everything you do. Besides, the sharing of the data with 'authorities' was the lube that pushed these systems in. Gotta catch them terrorists, right. No no no, it might seem like a grandparent giving $50 dollar to her grandson on his birthday, but I'm telling ya'll, terrorism.
aabbcc1241 7y ago
The card itself cannot identify the user, but the tracks of all transactions related to a card can lead to other problems. E.g. When you use the card to pay for A, the receiver many query in a federate system and found that you also paid for B recently.
hkai 7y ago
I think you underestimate how easily you can be identified from your spending on that card

dtech 7y ago

You will always have vendor neutral payments with bank transactions, which are EU wide and regulated with SEPA. Don't know about Sweden, but in the Netherlands that's widely supported and free for consumers. What's the harm in people using a proprietary app on top of that that has slightly more convenience?

johnlorentzson 7y ago
Because it's become a standard that almost everyone is expected to use.
- tyfon 7y ago
  We got a system in Norway called Vipps for small transactions that I refuse to take part in but it seems like 99% of the rest of the population are using it. I've yet to have anyone refuse to pay me via direct bank transfer or me paying them in this way when I ask and explain why I don't use Vipps.
  - 2rsf 7y ago
    > explain why I don't use Vipps please explain. direct bank transfers are still slow (same bank) to unacceptable (different banks) for most payments
    - pimterry 7y ago
      In general, within the EU, this is rapidly improving. > still slow (same bank) SEPA instant credit transfer is standardized since 2017 and supported by > 50% of banks & payment providers (https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-instant-credit-transfer https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...). If both parties support that then bank transfers take under 10 seconds. If that's not supported somehow classic SEPA transfers work everywhere, and arrive in 1 business day max. 1 day isn't something you can use in a shop of course, but if you need to pay back a friend it's pretty acceptable imo. > unacceptable (different banks) Not accepting IBANs or SEPA payments from other banks or from banks in other EU countries is illegal, and comes with substantial fines. It still happens in places of course, especially in slow moving large orgs, but if you still find organizations doing this nowadays then you can report them as breaching EU payment regulations (https://eba.europa.eu/consumer-corner/how-to-complain https://eba.europa.eu/consumer-corner/how-to-complain) and that should set a fire under things pretty quickly.
      - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
        >If that's not supported somehow classic SEPA transfers work everywhere, and arrive in 1 business day max. Right, but one business day will often be two days during the week and four days over the weekend, because many banks set an arbitrary cut-off time after which they will no longer process any payments. One bank I use will process payments received after 12:00 pm (lunchtime) on the next day. So the money will arrive two days later, unless it's a Friday, in which case the money arrives on Tuesday.
        mixmastamyk 7y ago
        Keep a full paycheck spare and then never have to worry about it again.
    - tyfon 7y ago
      Vipps has very poor validation of money transfers and there has been a lot of fraud already where people craft Vipps messages that look like official transfers and then tell people that they send money wrong and ask them to send it back. It is very hard to rectify things like that. A bank will tell me if I enter the account number wrong at least and show me the name of the account holder before I press send, with Vipps you just go without validation. Direct bank transfers in Norway can be made instantly for a tiny fee, but personally I have yet to be in a situation where that is required.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
The question is: Can you interoperate without using the proprietary app? Facebook also builds on the internet and the web, but you can not interoperate with Facebook without becoming a Facebook user. And "interoperate" means that you can use an alternative while the other party does not (i.e., you are not dependent on the other party's cooperation in order to be able to use an alternative). But also, in any case it's still a bad idea because the payment provider has the ability to just disobey your payment orders, and regulation doesn't help with that but rather potentially makes it even more likely "for security reasons". Payment providers use secret methods to decide whether your payment order is considered a security risk and then will prevent you from spending your own money based on their secret decision making process, or at least make you jump through unpredictable hoops before they allow you to spend your own money. That's a major security risk for you, in addition to all the security risks due to the well-known terrible IT security practices of banks as well as/in combination with the privacy risks of leaving a digital trail of your locations and purchases.

ksec 7y ago

>I really hope this trend dies off, a cash-less society is a terrible idea.... Exactly. We could get rid of coins, and replace it with an electronic variant and leave paper cash alone. I am all for contactless payment, but I want the option to use cash. The only thing that guarantees privacy. And this is especially true in places without democracy, as shown in the Hong Kong Protest.

smichel17 7y ago
A few years ago I would have agreed with you, but spending time in Germany has changed my view on coins. See, in the US, coins are kind of useless on their own. You can't pay for anything with only coins, so giving exact change is always an extra step on top of paying with cash. Ugh. But in the EU, they have €1 and €2 coins, and it's difficult to overstate how much this changes the dynamic. It means that for purchases under ~€10, it's suddenly possible to pay with coins only. It also means that for cash purchases, you can often receive your change as, well, change. So for large purchases, I'll pay with cash only and receive change, which goes in my coin pouch, and for small purchases I'll give exact change in coins only, using them up. This actually becomes less onerous than paying exclusively with bills, like I do in the US, because you use up your coins naturally instead of collecting them in a jar or something to be counted later. It also helps that taxes are included in the price label, so a €5.99 purchase will yield €0.01 instead of something in the vicinity of $0.75.
- hexl 7y ago
  He didn't literally mean coins, it's cash what He was talking about.
  - Hasnep 7y ago
    They made the distinction between coins and paper cash: > We could get rid of coins, and replace it with an electronic variant and leave paper cash alone.
- robert_foss 7y ago
  Being a Swede, who now lives in Germany I would say that there must be a middle ground between the extreme cash dependency of Germany and the opposite in Sweden. I have no idea how you do your shopping and end up not getting a pool of useless 1/5 cent coins. People literally laugh you in the face if you try to purchase things with them. Your only option is to give them away or collect them in a jar. And needing to constantly go to ATMs just to keep notes on you is kind of ridiculous. However I've also been to card only restaurants in Sweden when the card network was down. There was no plan B, the payment interaction just fell apart.

rlv-dan 7y ago

> buses not taking cash is perfectly fine I guess, if you are ok with leaving an electronic trail whereever you go...

johnlorentzson 7y ago
The tickets have no way of identifying you unless you register on their website. You could always just get rid of your card and get a new one when you want to.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  They can't identify you, provided that they don't pair that data up with anything else. Eg just a few trips where you didn't turn your phone location off on the bus would be enough to know which card is yours. Even if you turn your location off every other time it wouldn't matter. Or your phone service provider can do that even with your location set to off. Don't the plastic cards cost extra?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - paublyrne 7y ago
    If they can track your phone surely how you pay for the trip is neither here nor there.
- jalk 7y ago
  How do you add money to the card? Here in Denmark we have a similar thing, but the only way to top up your card anonymously is through cash. Or do you have prepaid throwaway cards?
  - 2rsf 7y ago
    Yes, prepaids and possibly cash
- ulzeraj 7y ago

beefield 7y ago

> I really hope this trend dies off, a cash-less society is a terrible idea. I fully understand that my opinion is both unintuitive and deeply disliked by many if not most people, so I can only ask you to spend some time thinking if you really have thought this through. Anyway, I believe there are realistic scenarios where it is good for the economy and society to have negative interest rates imposed by central banks. Cash is one of the things that prohibits this, thus we need to get rid of cash. At the same time we definitely need privacy respecting payment methods. Thus we would likely need to develop some kind of physical tokens/coins/notes/whatever whose value is time dependent. Biggest problem here is that the amount of people who simultaneously understand the need of negative rates and privacy respecting payment systems seems to be for all practical purposes pretty close to zero, so I am not holding my breath here.

pb82 7y ago
I'm skeptic. Forcing people to buy crap they don't need by denying them ways to store cash will probably increase some numbers in some spreadsheets. But is it really a net positive for society? Or are there other reasons that I didn't consider like more people seeking investment options like the stock market?
- 74ls00 7y ago
  From the long term view, it seems reasonable to assume that the high economic growth rates of the 20th century are not going to be something we’ll see again anytime soon. An environmentally-sustainable economic outlook for the future is likely to see long period of close to 0% growth, and more frequent periods of negative growth. Environmentally-sustainable economics seems like a net positive for society, and at this point, an almost necessity.
- beefield 7y ago
  Well, not "forcing"[1] people buying crap today makes the people creating the crap jobless and yes, that has a real cost for society. first because the jobless do not create value and second because someone needs to pay their unemployment benefits. [1] Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You can voluntarily choose to lend your money to the bank if you agree with the interest rate. If you do not, you are free to do as you please with your money. Find someone who is willing to pay better interest rates (typically more risky)[2], buy crap, or even buy bitcoin or gold. [2] Interesting question is, why society should guarantee you a return[3] on your investments if you do not yourself find a counterparty that is willing to pay you high enough return that you are happy with? Smells awfully lot like socialism to me. [3] And why this guaranteed return needs to be exactly 0%? Why not 5%?

andrepd 7y ago

Like many things (social networking, digital AI assistants, keyboard text prediction) they are creepy because they are closed-off and proprietary and you have fuck all idea what's happening with your data, besides vaguely knowing you're being monitored in a way Orwell could only dream of. Once you take out the fact that e.g. messages you write are being recorded, your speech is being monitored 24/7 by a microphone in your home, or all your text input is being stored in somebody's server halfway across the world, those technologies could have the potential to be really neat indeed. One can dream.

alkonaut 7y ago

The proprietary id is at least co-owned by all the major consumer banks, so it's slightly better than it being just some random small company. I'd prefer if it was a government operation of course, especially since now almost all contact with authorities goes through this system. The right thing to do would be to create a publicly owned e-ID and electronic cash, and replace the reliance on BankID and credit cards.

askesum 7y ago
As a Trisquel user I am completely excluded from this system.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  As far as I’m aware all Linux users are out of luck. Buying a cheap used android phone for BankID is probably the easiest solution.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago

Societies are imperfect and have a huge inertia, they need grey areas for compensating for those imperfections. Cash is a way into those grey areas. So that you can not have a phone, or be a hobo, be off the grid, go to a gay bar without leaving a trace, hold a controversial artistic/polical/religious event, let a beaten spouse organize an escape, mess around as a kid without your parents always knowing everything, try a product the state doesn't approve of and so on.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

> They use NFC/RFID ticket cards which can't identify you. Pretty easy to ping these cards and any wireless ID (IMSI, WiFi MAC). Enough hits and the correlations will easily fall in to place.

atyppo 7y ago

I'm not Swedish -- how is this being accomplished? By way of legislation? Here in NYC, Metrocard data can be obtained by LE or the DA. A new fare payment system currently being implemented is presumably even easier to track people.

bryal 7y ago

At least Open Banking (PSD2) will allow for third party alternatives to Swish and banking apps. Maybe even open-source applications will become possible, but getting a PSD2 license as an open-source developer may be tricky.

PeterStuer 7y ago

It is terrible, but it will not die off. There has been incredible lobbying for this. This is the ultimate capitalist's wet dream: making a profit on every transaction. The privacy angle is tangential, just collateral in the land-grab, just one more way to squeeze the last drop of profit out of everything you do. Besides, the sharing of the data with 'authorities' was the lube that pushed these systems in. Gotta catch them terrorists, right. No no no, it might seem like a grandparent giving $50 dollar to her grandson on his birthday, but I'm telling ya'll, terrorism.

aabbcc1241 7y ago

The card itself cannot identify the user, but the tracks of all transactions related to a card can lead to other problems. E.g. When you use the card to pay for A, the receiver many query in a federate system and found that you also paid for B recently.

hkai 7y ago

I think you underestimate how easily you can be identified from your spending on that card