Ah, that does make it better but still concerning - that would stop ME from also being paid in cash)

When it comes to in-person payment, would Taler be usable without a mobile device? Say, with just a card like normal banking? I would have it much rather coexist with cash anyway.

But yea, sounds like an improvement when it comes to online payments.

I stick to cash because I don’t think my bank should know things as sensitive as the full history of my transactions, which may or may not also be sold to others. Also in times like these I would not be surprised if you’d get in trouble for transferring some funds to a dissident’s card, while in reality it was just splitting the bar bill.

The suggestions like this also scare me in that it might require you to carry a smartphone all the time for things as basic as payment.

I guess he means the banknotes having individual numbers on them. However, that still doesn’t give full automatic traceability - between these being recorded, a lot can happen to the banknote.

Yes. But the draw is that it is still leagues easier use privately than the traditional banking system. With cryptocurrency, you “only” need proper understanding of OPSEC. With banking system - you also need to break the law somewhere in the KYC process.

Maybe an independent mechanic can do so then?

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hand-writes a pgp-encrypted message

Still, a decentralized protocol, not a platform, would have a much easier time circumventing stupid laws like this, as well as censorship.

“And the government officials can sell this data to me. Relatively inexpensive too”.

Not to mention an XMPP server is lighter than even Conduit, let alone Synapse!

If it is a public groupchat - why not?

What about using a normal, non-Cloudflare VPS for this?

AND there have been news that RCS can be blocked for rooted phones and custom operating systems!

Where I live, a lot of popular services, including major foreign social media and torrents everyone uses, are blocked - yet they still have a massive userbase.

And since the scanning is supposed to be client-side, how would a server check if the scanning was really performed? What if the server does receive and log the needed responses, just to be safe, but the client actually just sends them automatically while lacking such functionality?

If I cared about the contents of email staying safe, would rather not depend on a provider and just use provider-independent PGP. If safety is more important than universality - then I’d use something outside of email in general, like XMPP+OMEMO or maybe Simplex.

Yea, it is clear if there is just one closed-source app. But if we’re talking XMPP/Matrix - they have multiple open-source clients, even if some of them does introduce scanning, no way it wouldn’t be forked to remove it.

I meant telemetry to Google and/or manufacturer. With grandma, I can at least install Linux on her laptop and say to message me there (that’s pretty much what I did with mom).

Yea, but a typical cellphone is not as easy to make private as a typical laptop or desktop. Lineage has some tradeoffs and not accessible on all devices, and Graphene needs even more specific, quite expensive hardware!