Geldkarte

[Peter Tomlinson]

Which reminds me that the Leeds VisaCash trial also had anonymous cards,
because I persuaded a young lady in the RBS to give me one. My mother lived
in Leeds at the time, but too far out to be offered a card, so I tried to
show her how to use the anonymous one. That discovered two infrastructure
problems: she could not read the small characters on the display on the load
terminal, and the cake shop on the Headrow had only one terminal, positioned
so high up that my (rather short) old mum could not see the display...

When my mum moved away, that gave rise to the joke that VisaCash
transactions in Leeds halved (ah well, its still the Jubilee holiday day, so
why not?)

Why can't we get these banking smart card deployments in Europe right
(except for Cartes Bancaires, until they got hacked)?

Peter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stefan Kelm" <kelm@secorvo.de>
---- snip ----
>
> One other problem wrt privacy was/is that although the system design
> allows for the anonymous use of the Geldkarte (using the so-called
> "white card") most banks only offer the account-bound variant of
> the card. In fact, most users are not even aware of the anonymous
> alternative because the banks do not advertize their very existence.
> It is quite obvious why...
>
> Cheers,
>
> Stefan.
>