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French Town Tests Cashless Society
SamiousHaze writes to mention a Silicon.com article about an attempt in a French tourist town, Caen, to do away with cash in some locales. From the article: "Among [the locations in the trial] is an underground car park; the town hall; a bus stop which can transmit timetable information; a cinema poster which downloads video trailers to users' mobiles; a local supermarket, where people can pay for their groceries with a mobile phone, and a tourist information sign outside the historic Abbaye des Hommes. By touching the mobile against the 'Flytag' logo at each of these locations, users can pay for services or receive information straight to their phone."
Now, Caen is an interesting place. It's hardly a sleepy backwater - it's the busiest urban centre in the area. (And the traffic is awful). It's actually a very modern, thriving city that was rebuilt after being almost completely destroyed in the aftermath of the D-Day invasion in 1944 (even most of the pretty bits are actually restoration of the original buldings). I'd suggest that of all the places I've been to in France, Caen is certainly one of the top runners when it comes to modernity.
Also, the French are pretty keen on their plastic and were early adopters of payment cards and related technologies. So.. it'll be interesting to see how this experiment pans out because it's being carried out in more-or-less ideal conditions.
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Somewhat different I must say.
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Even if it isn't the government-sancationed variety. I don't know of too many people that would willingly create a transaction record of payments for various of their habits.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Talk about opportunities for loss of privacy. In a truely cashless society, there would be no way to have private transactions. Everything would be accounted for. Maybe it is one of those things where if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about, but still. I'd like to keep the option of paying my dealer^H^H^H^H^Hbookie^H^H^H^H^Hfriend without some kind of electronic trail.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
...for now there will exist databases which will show exactly where you were, when and what you were doing.
The State will be able to access these databases when it feels compelled to do so.
We were afraid of the State, 1984-like, maintaining huge databases, monitoring us all.
Instead, we have private companies maintaining these databases and the State accesses them when it needs to.
Either way, we have sacrificed true freedom for convenience - and we have done so without ANY meaningful public discourse upon the matter.
There was in fact no choice made; this situation has simply come upon us, through market forces.
We - all of us, States, citizens, one and all - are not in control of the direction (I can't say decisions, because deliberate choice is not occuring) our society is taking.
This is deeply worrying and ultimate stems from television, which is responsible for the lack of meaningful public discourse in our society.
I don't want to get a 700+ phonebill each month for my expenses, I would never consider my cellphone Provider as my banking service. (because they en effect become your "banking service" if you only use your cellphone)
Proton has been around for a decade in Belgium already with the same philosophy. It's very convenient, and you can almost use it everywhere and where I can't I use my Credit Card.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
strip clubs? Where do you swipe your debit card?
200 people in a village in France test this "cashless society" - no cash itself, just pay with a mobile phone.
At least 250 million people in US, Europe, Asia, use widely credit cards, and don't need to use cash.
Probably giving a tip with a mobile phone is not essentially different from giving a tip with a credit card either...
Interesting irony. Debit and credit cards were used to stop burglars from taking your cash, but right now the electronic frauds are becoming popular so it's MUCH EASIER for someone to steal your identity (and then buy goods using your money) than to steal your cash.
Now suppose a natural disaster (earthquake, hurricane, who knows) took out the power lines. How will you buy the goods you need?
Just like Mondex failed. ian
Great, now how is this guygoing to afford his lifestyle?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
When I read the article, I immediately thought that the town was going back to a bartering system.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I wonder what this will do to the beggar population in that town. I've notice that I almost never carry cash anymore and as such I have no money to give to beggars.
"Aw crap! My wallet's battery just died."
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
The legal tender system was created in order to unify a medium of exchange for goods and services. The money moving businesses were an unfortunate growth from that invention. (Money moving such as savings, checking, loaning and related services) But if monetary value exists without portable and anonymous tokens, then you really have to TRUST the value managers and the systems it operates from. If a government (assuming the controlling entity is official government... if it's not, it soon will be) or a ranking official of a government decided someone was to be harmed for some reason, it would then be [more] trivial to strip a person of their assets and means of survival. Forget about cancelling credit/debit cards and freezing bank accounts, once they strip you of cash, there is no longer any way out.
That makes people EXTREMELY vulnerable to abuse by the system. (And if I hear "If you aren't doing anything wrong, you shouldn't be afraid" crap again, I'm going to throw a chair! "wrong" is always defined by whoever is in power and always a subjective notion. It's "wrong" to kill innocent people... unless your president orders it... hrm...)
The cashless system will work as nicely as expected, but the tests will not include the abuse that can and will happen.
Furthermore, if you will, your dollar bills have unique serial numbers attached to it, so whoever spends the dollar bill can be traced.
How, exactly, could this be accomplished? The teller doesn't keep a record of who got what bills, nor do the grocers, nor my barber, nor my bartenders.
Now, when they imbed RFID chips in all your money that would be easy to understand, but please enlighten me as to how serial numbers can be used to track you?
To me, this is the kind of electronic cash that should be the future. Total privacy, total anonymity, total freedom to use your own money as and how you like, absolute security against identity theft through reckless banks or merchants, hard limits to card misuse if stolen (and none of it attributable to you), relatively proof against electronic attacks such as keystroke monitors and viruses.
So why aren't these cards in widespread use? Merchants don't like extra card readers if no customers have the cards. Customers don't want cards they can't use. Neither like systems where most faults can be pinned on them and not the vendor. Banks hate systems that keep cash in the hands of consumers, as they make a lot of money speculating on the side (even in countries they're not strictly allowed to, they just do it overseas). Governments hate it because they can't track individuals and freezing accounts has less impact when you can carry a small fortune in your wallet.
The problem, then, is social and not technical. The French experiment uses inferior technology, for the purpose of satisfying some of the social requirements at the cost of placing all parties at greater risk.
(For some reason, humanity has all the attributes commonly associated with lemmings, when it comes to technology and risk. Given the choice of inferior products with greater risk, or superior products with little or no risk, societies always choose the inferior path.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm an American that lives in Norway. Since moving here 7 years ago, I don't recall using cash very much at all, much to my son's dismay. He likes to jingle my pockets for change to put in his piggy bank, but I have to make special stops to get change for him to avoid disappointing him.
I am a person that never has an empty savings account but regularly keeps my spending account low to avoid spending too much. See it's nice to have a reminder that you're blowing all your dough. I don't go to the ATM machine, so I never know what my balance is. Simply put, if there's no money in the account when I try to pay for something, I pick up my phone, push a few buttons, pay for what I need and I'm cautious for the rest of the month.
Since leaving the states, I no longer have a checkbook. All my bills (except my AMEX) is on autopay. I would put the AMEX that way too, but I'd like to see how much I'm spending on it.
The office I used to work in has a coke machine that was payable by telephone and I've even paid for train tickets using my phone as well.
As for cash, the only time I use it is when I'm paying the maid or paying the car wash that is run by people that would prefer to fly below the radar.
What I'm really trying to say is that Norway has been more or less a cashless society for several years now. Of course people still use cash, I know a lot of older people that still don't feel comfortable with the idea of everything being done with plastic, but it's an option which is nice to leave open to them. Cash has some benefits.
As for the experience in France, well, I see it as publicizing something that is not that interesting. It sounds as if they're just testing to see if telephone payment is an option. Personally I hate that idea since there are many times my telephone battery dies and I'd be stranded. Can you imagine not being able to pay for a taxi because you forgot to charge your battery?
As for America, well it's a long time before this modern world ever gets there. There's a tremendous amount of money made by the banks on bounced check fees and even worse, "Overdraw attempt fees" on using your check cards. I mean, come on, if the money isn't in the bank and the bank and the store knows it there on the spot, it's the store that should penalize you, not the bank. And having worked at a banking clearing house, I wrote a report generator for producing an account of three things on one report.
1) How much money was lost due to bounced checks
2) How much money was made from overdraw fees that were later corrected by the account holder
3) How much of a difference was there between the two.
The number was always positive and not by small margins. I ran this script many many many times because I simply couldn't believe the numbers coming out. In one case, I printing a 60 page report of this activity over a single week and tallied it manually to ensure that what I was calculating was in fact correct. It's unbelievable. The American banking system is dependant on these overdraw fees and will never separate with them. So as long as that's the case, removing classic style paper based money and checks is out of the question.
Question: How do you buy a phone?
I would think with unemployment sky rocketing in France, that many French towns world be accustomed to a
cashless society.
There's a big drive from Maestro (Those responsible for most debit cards. Also known as Cirrus. Associated to MasterCard) to get more people to pay for small things by plastic. Leeds train station is full of ads.
The problem? Transaction fees mean it's pointless vendors accepting them for anything less than about £3.50. To make matters worse, not everywhere accepts Solo, which is an extremely popular variety of Maestro.
I would love to pay for things totally with plastic. Money goes into my bank account, why should I have to muck about turning it into cash before I buy things?
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
This money mostly comes from a cut of the merchant fees embedded in every purchase; credit card companies have basically forced retailers to pass the surcharges on to everybody and not just credit card users.
It's a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario. Everyone who uses credit cards drives up the prices for everybody. Only people who use credit cards can get a discount for using credit cards as companies give back a cut of what they demand from retailers.
If no one used credit cards, prices would be lower since the merchant's fees wouldn't be spread out across all goods. However, if people use credit cards, then prices are pushed up for everybody except credit card users who get a discount relative to the others even though they still pay slightly more too.
Assume that a spread-out merchant's fee is a surcharge of X on goods, that a cashback card gives back 80% of that, and that the price on goods responds instantly to changes in cost:Naturally, prices don't change that fast in the real world, but the aggregate of merchant fees do get applied to prices eventually.
At any rate, credit cards are also evil because they give a third party information that tracks your purchases and locations, and if you get sick or find yourself suddenly unable to pay, you may get hit with suddenly increased interest rates and unable to declare bankruptcy thanks to tougher laws passed on the behalf of credit card companies. Welcome to legalized usury -- predatory lending to the financially disadvantaged.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Money goes into my bank account, why should I have to muck about turning it into cash before I buy things?
Most of the time, plastic is nice and convenient. Unless you want to buy something without leaving traces... All these cashless schemes tend to have tracking as either feature (advertised... rarely to users) or side effect (tracking service not offered but possible).
<tinfoil hat>
You can have problems if the transaction logs fall into wrong hands - governement, marketers, etc. I'm not saying about buying anything illegal, some perfectly legal purchases can be construed to be evidence against you, like "ever bought beer? pay double health insurance you alcoholic!" or "bought quran? send this terrorist scum off to gitmo!" or maybe "ordered "dvd-backup" software? let's raid his house, he's probably infringing copyright!".
</tinfoil>
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