New York Times, 12 August 1994, Page C1.
All in all a good article. I have a couple problems with it, which may be due more to the people interviewed than to the reporter: * First, the credit card means that the vendor and bank can both record the details of the transaction, and sell those records on the open market. This is hardly "total privacy". The only thing PGP is doing here is protecting the credit card number. In fact, Internet commerce has the potential to greatly reduce our privacy, via collection and dissemination of transaction dossiers. This is already happening on Prodigy and Compuserve, for example. + Phil Zimmerman is correct to note that digital cash would be a more important development, but he doesn't describe digital cash very well. He says the features of untraceability, etc. aren't part of the dollars we use now, but in fact these features do exist in the physical coins and bills that have been the most commonly used form of money for millenia. The role of true digital cash protocols (beware of pretenders like "Netcash" that don't keep the privacy feature) is to bring these features of bills and coins to cyberspace, in place of the new, Orwellian system of identified credit and debit cards that has reared its ugly head during this ugly century. Jim Hart chaos.bsu.edu