I D É E S   F O R T E S    Issue 2.02 - February 1996

Follow the Mondex

By Simon Davies



Ever since I first heard about electronic cash, I've been its greatest proponent. What a brilliant idea: use high security technology to put cash onto a chip. Secure. Controllable. Smart. And, above all, anonymous and untraceable.

Electronic cash works in the same way as the conventional telephone debit card. It uses a smart card to store the value of cash authorised from a bank ATM machine or by way of specially adapted pay phones connected to the customers bank. Instead of handing over cash to a store, you hand over the card. No signature required. The relevant amount is electronically deducted from the card. You can even configure the card to lock its cash until a pin number is entered.

Think of it - privacy-friendly, smart money. Cheaper than credit cards. More secure than cash. More anonymous than cheques. I was an instant convert.

A UK outfit, Mondex, is the first company to take on the idea in any big way. Mondex is a partnership between the Midland and National Westminster banks. Since June, it has been engaged in a trial in Swindon which it hopes will lead the world in electronic cash. Most of the big High Street retailers are participating in the scheme. Currently, 6,000 people are using the cards in Swindon, and Mondex hopes this will rise to as many as 40,000.

As a privacy enthusiast, I was always anxious that e-cash should be truly anonymous. And Mondex assured me it was. Here it is in their Mondex homepage: "In everyday use, Mondex transactions are anonymous, just like cash ... Only a cardholder will have access to the statement entries on their card which detail transactions."

And here it is again: page 15 of the Mondex Media Pack assures me that the cards are as anonymous as cash. But to my surprise, the project manager of the Swindon experiment, Rob Jameson, recently told me that Mondex maintains an audit trail of transactions. Jameson revealed that retailers have a card-linked record of recent transactions, which could also be made available to the bank.

I was furious. I felt I had been duped. Mondex later confirmed the situation to Gavin Clark of Network Week, who I had tipped off. Of course, they exclaimed, we'd only reveal the information if a magistrate told us to. Or, presumably, the police. Or an authorised government agency. Or any organisation with a statutory right. My immediate response was to make a complaint to the Trading Standards authority under the Trades Descriptions Act. My intention is to force Mondex to dismantle the transaction recording machin-ery, or to stop likening their product to cash. It will be a few months before Trading Standards decides whether to take on the banks in open court.

Electronic cash has the potential to be genuinely anonymous, but it needs an honest commitment to privacy from the industry. Otherwise, public support for the technology may evaporate. Mine certainly has.

Simon Davies (davies@privint.demon.co.uk) is director general of Privacy International.

  Life Server

I wish the Web had a life-expectancy server. You would call up a Web form that asks for a batch of demographic and lifestyle information, and it would tell you in statistical terms how much longer you have to live. ("At the rate you're going, you have 17.3 plus or minus 3.1 years left.") It could even offer a commentary on how much the outcome would change if you gave up smoking, moved to the country, carried a gun, improved your relationships, and so on.

You could have a continual update delivered to the bottom of your computer screen, with the seconds ticking off your life expectancy. The clock might tick at different rates, or it might even tick backward as updated predictive information becomes available.

Phil Agre (pagre@weber.ucsd.edu) teaches communications at the University of California, San Diego.

  What's 4 sale?

Have you noticed how the Internet has not yet developed a simple signpost for electronic commerce? Nothing glitzy and 3-D - just a way to find "I have this to sell" Web pages among all the other stuff crowding the Net. Yet all that is necessary is an agreed-upon keyword to act as the "For Sale" sign. My recommendation is the term 4sale, which is surprisingly almost absent on the Web.

Suppose you want to sell radiator hoses. Simply create a Web page describing each one in detail, and add the keyword 4sale somewhere in the text. Now, a search for "radiator hoses 4sale" makes it possible to quickly find your products on the Web. Voil[radical], instantaneous marketplaces for every item imaginable with today's technology. And don't forget to use 2buy!

Paul Nunes (paul.f.nunes@ac.com) works in Andersen Consulting's Center for Strategic Technology Research.

  Manglemania

I knew my usual mode of transit would have to change when I moved from the Netherlands to the United States. Back home, I rode bikes, trams, and trains. Where I live now in rural Connecticut, everything is a car ride away. Public transportation is nonexistent. So, I finally had to learn how to drive. Just one problem no one told me about: to get my license, I had to relinquish my name.

"Van Bakel?" A puzzled look from the Department of Motor Vehicles clerk who checked my papers. "That's your last name? Two words?" I nodded and said that because the license would be my only official American picture ID, everything had to be accurate. Especially my name. After some listless pounding on the keyboard, the clerk turned back to me with a sullen expression. "Can't do it. The computer allows just one word in that area. It's going to have to be Vanbakel from now on. No space."

Great. So now the only piece of nationally accepted identification I have misspells my name, out of "technological necessity" - or, more likely, bureaucratic laziness. Over time, my license will no doubt spawn many more documents that also misidentify me.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds all this a bit bothersome. On one hand, we immigrants don't want to be too persnickety. On the other, isn't it interesting that not everyone is called John Smith or Mary Miller? I've always liked the metaphor of America as a salad bowl, not a melting pot. But even now, the old Ellis Island mentality - where immigration officials carelessly mutilated many a family name whose spelling was unfamiliar - is alive and well. At least at the DMV.

No, it's not just the license. For a people consisting almost entirely of immigrants, Americans can be amazingly careless when it comes to spelling "foreign" names. Roughly seven out of ten letters and publications addressed to me mess up my name, even after I've spelled it out in a letter. Only last week, I received a package addressed to Van Winkle.

The manglemania is like a Colorado beetle: always multiplying and virtually unstoppable. Databases and mailing lists are big business. The spelling errors they contain spread to five, then ten, then twenty other such lists. By the time you've stomped out one error, a small army of new ones is ready to take over the identity-blurring work.

OK, so it ain't Bosnia. But many people feel their names are a crucial piece of who they are. In a country that prides itself on being a bastion of individualism, I'd like to claim the privilege to keep something as individual as my name.

Rogier van Bakel (rogier@li.com) is a Dutch-born journalist who writes for European and American magazines.

  Video Baby

For 15 years, I've heard jeremiads about videogames and how they're turning kids into malignant, illiterate little zombies who massacre people en masse after playing too much Mortal Kombat. What a crock.

I am one of those videogame babies. I was born the same year as Pong. And I think videogames have been perfect training for life in the new millenium. Just navigating through an urban landscape, I have to confront a world of lurid graphics, blaring music, and rampant violence. Frogger was the perfect trial run.

In a videogame world, everything happens at once and has to be dealt with in real time. This is what cognitive psychologists call parallel processing. What a shame, say critics, that videogames pump up kids' parallel processing abilities at the expense of contemplation, and linear, serial thought.

It used to be a serial world, I guess. But it's not anymore. I need to think like a Donkey Kong jockey. Yes, videogames have fundamentally shaped my brain. Thank god.

J. C. Herz (mischief@phantom.com) is the author of Surfing on the Internet.