StealthMonger wrote:
They can't be as "anonymous as cash" if the party being dealt with can be identified. And the party can be identified if the transaction is "online, real-time". Even if other clues are erased, there's still traffic analysis in this case. What the offline paradigm has going for it is the possibility of true, untraceable anonymity through the use of anonymizing remailers and related technologies.
most people who heard the statement, understood that. i think that possibly 2nd level detail was that they didn't want PII easily associated by casual merchant. Initial response was to remove name from payment cards & magstripes. This also precluded merchants from requesting other forms of identification to see if the names matched the name on the payment card. The implication being that the payment infrastructure would have to come up with other mechanisms to improve the infrastructure integrity. The offline payment paradigms ... while touting "true" anonymity were actually primarily justified based on other factors. We had been asked to design and cost the dataprocessing supporting US deployments of some of the "offline" products (that were being used in Europe). Along the way, we did some business process and revenue analysis and realized that the primary motivation behind these system deployments was the float. About the same time that there was the EU about the privacy of electronic retail payments ... there was also a statement by the EU (and some of the country central banks) that the offline products would be allowed to keep the float for a short grace period .... to help in the funding of the infrastructure deployment ... but after the grace period ... the operators would have to start paying interest on the balance held in the "offline" instruments (eliminating float from the equation). After that, much of the interest in the offline deployments drifted away. In that time frame we had also done design, implementation and deployment of a payment transaction infrastructure supporting target marketing ... recent reference http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008c.html#27 Diversity support was for a small pilot of 60mil accounts and 1.5million transaction/day ... but capable of scaling up to 20-30 times that amount. There was significant attention paid to privacy issues and it was subject to quarterly auditing by some dozen or so privacy organizations. there had to be a large amount of sensitive treatment of the information along the lines of what HIPAA specifies for health information. aka: anonymized Previously identifiable data that have been deidentified and for which a code or other link no longer exists. An investigator would not be able to link anonymized information back to a specific individual. [HIPAA] (see also anonymous, coded, directly identifiable, indirectly identifiable) as part of co-authoring x9.99 financial privacy standard, one of the things we created was a privacy merged glossory and taxonomy ... including GLBA, HIPAA, and EU-DPD references some notes: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#glosnote in our work on x9.59 financial transaction standard http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959 we made the statement that it was privacy agnostic ... since the transactions were tied to accounts ... but then whether or not the accounts were tied to individuals was outside the x9.59 standard http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#x959 As a total aside ... as part of the Digicash liquidation, we were brought in to evaluate the patent portfolio. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]