commit 79ec48868c4b0a85cce4f538425e44d2492bb9fc
parent 19e3c0e440f8bbb0548a2c79882a95344bdc7373
Author: Michiel Leenaars <michiel.ml@nlnet.nl>
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2025 10:35:16 +0100
Add links to intro
Diffstat:
1 file changed, 27 insertions(+), 17 deletions(-)
diff --git a/doc/usenix-security-2025/paper/intro.tex b/doc/usenix-security-2025/paper/intro.tex
@@ -1,25 +1,37 @@
\section{Introduction}\label{intro}
This paper presents the design and implementation of a protocol for
-donation receipts that satisfies a broad range of potential technical
+donation handling that satisfies a broad range of potential technical
requirements and desiderata for donation systems. The system enables
-donors to make anonymous donations to registered charities and still
+donors to make incognito donations to registered charities and still
receive a tax benefit from the tax authorities when filing their tax
statement while preventing fraud.
-Donating is an important way for people to empower causes they believe
-in, and facilitate collective action. In many countries, there is
-explicit recognition of the public benefit of such generosity: a
-friendly tax treatment of donations. It makes sense: money you
-immediately give away to a recognized good cause is not income that
-will be converted by you into private consumption. So conceptually it
-deserves a different tax treatment.
-
-Donations can serve many causes, but quite often they are an obvious
-expression of the human right towards the freedom of thought,
-conscience and religion. Individual spending can be very intimate and
-personal, and even aggregate spending habits can reveal a great deal
-about people. This holds even more so for donating.
+Donating is an important way for people to empower causes they believe in, and
+facilitate collective action. In many countries, there is explicit state
+recognition of the wider public benefit of enabling such generosity: a friendly
+tax treatment of donations. It makes sense as well: money you immediately give
+away to a recognized good cause which is administered independently is not
+income that will be converted by you into private consumption. So conceptually
+it deserves a different tax treatment.
+
+Donations can serve many causes, but quite often they are an obvious expression
+of the human right towards the freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
+Unencumbered financial contributions to public benefit organisations as a means
+of collective action exhibits significant conceptual overlap with often
+strongly protected civil liberties like freedom of speech and freedom to
+assemble. The American Legislative Exchange Council, the largest voluntary
+membership organization of state legislators in the USA, adopted a model
+resolution in 2016 \cite{ALEC2016} in support of nonprofit donor privacy,
+stating that "nonprofit organizations are a primary mechanism by which groups
+of people assemble to practice free speech and express their opinions on
+political and nonpolitical subjects".
+
+Individual spending quickly becomes very intimate and personal, as even
+aggregate spending habits can reveal a great deal about people through
+behavioural analytics and psychographic profiling. This holds even more for
+acts of donating, which is typically highly revealing about e.g. belief systems
+and intersectionality of the individuals in question.
Protecting donation confidentiality is therefore important to protect
those freedoms. We have to recognize that in some situations the mere
@@ -29,8 +41,6 @@ right to privacy is another critical aspect of donating. International
human rights law provides a non-ambiguous responsibility to promote
and protect the right to privacy.
-:% NOTE[ML]: Perhaps we should additionally point to https://alec.org/model-policy/resolution-in-support-of-nonprofit-donor-privacy ?
-
Both these rights---towards freedom of thought and to privacy---are
anchored in key international treaties and covenants such as the
Universal Declaration on Human Rights (Article 12), the European
