more to the point will punters have a choice!
In an possible future cashless society, it’s one thing for your bank to know your complete spending history
including your most sensitive purchases
But what happens when someone obtains an court order to view a record of your financial transactions
to determine whether you deserve custody of your child? Or whether you’re a “suspicious character”,
had motive to commit a crime? even evidence of a crime committed etc
In a cashless society, activities such as gambling, going to a strip club and purchasing sex lose their anonymity.
Not only do banks gain knowledge of your every purchase, but they open the door for others to police your morality.
What if the morality of a situation is not 'black & white'? Who gets to decide that a legal purchase such as buying sex, porn or tipping a stripper is unethical?
What you and I may think is acceptable may be put in the same category as activities that are illegal and far less ethically ambiguous.
For example, in the US the Department of Justice had an a recent initiative called Operation Choke Point
that inadvertently grouped outright criminal activities etc and (legal)adult entertainment together in the same category of suspicious, high-risk activity,
despite their fundamental differences in legality.
In a cashless society, we lose the option to keep legal yet morally questionable purchases private, leaving others to label them as they will.
Cash and thus anonymous payments are a basic right and must stay a choice for everyone.
Otherwise we lose not only notes and coins, but especially our freedom, our privacy and the ability to live unobserved.
