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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

In a cashless society there is a lot of information about people in few hands and you never know how this information will be used now or in the future. It can be a democracy or a dictatorship. The corruption is everywhere, the threshold is different.

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That's not a problem in Australia. The LOT OF INFORMATION is really in the hands of a pile of people. Breaches in security (even medical systems) are almost weekly, so everyone really has access to all the info.

The police use bus passes to track criminals, and even the use of COVID check-ins are fair game.

That's probably true in practice but it doesn't have to be. In Japan they have train passes which effectively give you cashless money. They don't require you to register them. To add money you can put them in a machine and add cash. They can be used to buy many things. Most convenience stores accept them for example.

That said, most people do register them or use their phones in 2022 so in that case, yes you can be tracked.

They can also be tracked by their history if you have othe data sources. Let’s say you have cell phone data of someone. You can then correlate that with place (let’s say home and work) and time of a few purchases. This then de-anonymizes the card and the other purchases, even if they had their cellphone turned of in the delicate purchases.

That is completely incorrect. In cashless payment systems like GNU Taler customers are anonymous while only merchants e.g. recipients of payments are not anonymous to comply with anti money laundering and income transparency for the purpose of taxes.

Ah yes, the widespread and highly used GNU Taler

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