commit b8560a315b355e4c6e7cf9835bc6737f44fc9999
parent 09f30c1accfce19e062ee030a683785c941a1e49
Author: Christian Grothoff <grothoff@gnunet.org>
Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2022 11:24:41 +0100
merging changes from Martin
Diffstat:
2 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
diff --git a/2022-privacy/literature.bib b/2022-privacy/literature.bib
@@ -1,3 +1,12 @@
+@misc{schneier2016toxic,
+ title = {Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out?},
+ year = {2016},
+ month = {March},
+ howpublished = {\url{https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_toxic_asse.html}},
+}
+
+
+
@article{cap,
author = {Gilbert, Seth and Lynch, Nancy},
title = {Brewer's Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services},
diff --git a/2022-privacy/privacy.tex b/2022-privacy/privacy.tex
@@ -63,7 +63,15 @@ for critical infrastructure created by European institutions.
\section{Harmful coupling with identity}
The probably most dangerous idea of the ECB report is ``combining use of
-digital identity and CBDC''. Edward Snowden famously said at IETF 93 in 2019
+digital identity and CBDC''.
+Because even if central banks were neutral custodians of citizens' privacy
+(see above) the problem is the data itself.
+As Bruce Schneier has concisely argued already in 2016: ``Data is a toxic asset.
+We need to start thinking about it as such, and treat it as we would any other
+source of toxicity. To do anything else is to risk our security and privacy.''~\cite{schneier2016toxic}
+And here, the ECB is basically proposing to link identities with payments which
+consequently and inevitably produces highly sensitive metadata.
+Edward Snowden famously said at IETF 93 in 2019
that \begin{quote}
``(...) we need to get away from true-name payments on the Internet.
The credit card payment system is one of the worst things that happened
@@ -71,7 +79,6 @@ that \begin{quote}
identity.''
\end{quote}
If the European Union wants to avoid a dystopia of the transparent citizen
-(associated in the West with the vilified surveilance state in China),
it must enable citizens to put a firewall between their identity and their
payments. Tightly coupling them is thus probably the worst idea so far
proposed in the design space for CBDCs.
