At 6:01 PM -0800 2/2/98, James O'Toole wrote:
Tim,
Maintaining anonymity in the face of the regulatory framework is certain to be difficult, and anything difficult is usually rare, expensive, or both.
???
An interesting question about the Privacy Card product is whether the social pressure against it is strong enough to defeat its privacy whenever the product is well advertised. In other words, will a privacy product survive in spite of its own publicity in our current environment, or can privacy products only exist when their own existence is relatively unknown. This is interesting because in the latter case, we have only a very very weak form of privacy/anonymity because it is hard to be sure how much privacy backs a product whose very existence is semi-secret.
If a Privacy Card is legal, and can be issued by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, or some new issuer, and if merchants sign on (as would presumably be the case by default with Visa and so on), then what is the "social pressure" you speak of? Corporate cards are already widely accepted...most of you probably have a card issued to you through your employing institution. I see no "social pressure" to block usage of my Institute of Applied Ontology corporate AmEx card. The real roadblock is that government makes such privacy-protecting measures either difficult or illegal. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."