[Trisquel-users] Re : Is Paypal compatible with software freedom?
For the nth time: the seller does not need the buyers name. Thanks to GNU Taler, the seller will get paid and the buyer can prove she is the one who paid (for instance at the nearby shop where the good was shipped) without ever revealing her identity. Except for sellers making additional money by selling the customer personal information (an unethical activity), sellers do not want to manage such sensitive information anyway. It is a cost (security audits and so on). So you can keep on writing about "*if* seller gets buyers name and address" but those are no argument against Taler. It would be like saying that the Tor browser does not make users anonymous because "*if* a Tor user writes 'hello, I am John Doe'" then he is not anonymous anymore: that is true but that user does not have to identity himself and the entailed loss of anonymity is in no way Tor's fault.
[Trisquel-users] Re : Is Paypal compatible with software freedom?
My post was about showing, that gnutaler cannot work as a tool against profiling. It can. It uses what is known (for 34 years) as "blind signature" to guarantee the anonymity of the buyer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature See https://grothoff.org/christian/taler2016space.pdf to read more about GNU Taler.
[Trisquel-users] Re : Is Paypal compatible with software freedom?
I claim gnutaler does not change the fact, that seller can do profiling if he has proper software. Stallman opposes surveillance and profiling. That is why I think gnutaler does not enable Stallman to buy items from shops on the internet. You are wrong. Here is for instance what RMS says at 2:18:11 of http://dcc.ufmg.br/~lcerf/rms_en.webm (talk he gave May 29th this year): So I can't use Bitcoins to do the thing I most wanna do, which is pay stores and publishers anonymously. That's why we developed GNU Taler. Taler is not a crypto-currency. Taler is a payment system for payments denominated in, well, could be dollars or reais or whatever. And it's anonymous for the one who pays. Then there is the shipping problem, which is separate from the payment problem. Shipping to a nearby place, such as a physical store taking a commission, is an existing solution. Since GNU Taler emits a legally valid proof of payment, it would be the document to present to get the good.
[Trisquel-users] Re : Is Paypal compatible with software freedom?
the shop on the internet requires you to tell name and address. In France, many Internet shops propose the delivery in physical shops nearby. It is even cheaper. The buyer was identified when she paid though. GNU Taler solves that privacy problem. Should the inaccurate data have the effect you say, it would require seller to know his data is inaccurate. Profile-based recommendations (and the likes) are constantly assessed. If the accuracy of the profiles decrease, it is discovered. It looks like you expect a solution where, at once, all profiling techniques become obsolete. If you have such a solution, tell it!
[Trisquel-users] Re : Is Paypal compatible with software freedom?
Privacy-wise, GNU Taler is like cash: When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed. Just like payments in cash, nobody else can track how you spent your electronic money. However, you obtain a legally valid proof of payment. https://taler.net Thanks to the proof of payment, the purchased good can indeed be delivered anywhere close to your home (I believe Amazon proposes such a system in France, for instance) and you can prove you are the buyer, while remaining anonymous. Now, shipping to the address of a friend is fine too: not only it does not help building a profile of your friend (like you pretend) but it turns it harder to build a profile of your friends: she (probably) does not want the product, you do. In other words, that practice generates noise in the data used to build the profile. I am pretty sure Stallman would tell you all that too. He uses the same kind of arguments when he justifies why he sometimes asks people to lend him their cell phones.
