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Comment by F3nd0 | Hacker News Reader

> GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying.

And that backdoor for spying in this entirely free/libre software is…?

"3. Auditability - enable the state to tax income and crack down on illegal business activities

As a payment system must comply with local laws in order to operate legally, GNU Taler must be designed to comply with these requirements. GNU Taler must provide an audit trail for investigators operating under the law. Furthermore, we consider levying of taxes as beneficial to society, and fair taxation requires income transparency. Thus, GNU Taler must enable authorities to track income."

GNU Taler: Principles https://www.taler.net/en/principles.html

There is a third party — the exchange — that records everything that the merchant receives. It's explicitly designed not to be peer-to-peer. This exchange acts as a gatekeeper and the state's delegate, for the purposes of gathering financial information on private citizens.

Yes, but that is by design. Taler promises to protect the buyer’s privacy, not the merchant’s. That is very explicitly stated.

When you say ‘GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying’, that implies to me that it provides secret means of accessing private information to a third party. That is not true, since the party in question is directly involved in the system and there is no expectation of privacy guaranteed via technological means. Calling that ‘a backdoor’ is very misleading.

There is such an expectation for the customer, where it would make sense to speak of a backdoor if there was one, but there isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, and since it’s all libre software, anyone can verify this.

Perhaps the word "spying" implied the wrong thing. I did not intend to imply that this is in secret. This is an overt surveillance system that uses a known backdoor, not a covert one that uses a secret one.

The important detail being that this surveillance only concerns merchant income, not customer payments. Omitting that is bound to give people the wrong idea whenever you call it a ‘surveillance system’. :-)

(And I still doubt whether the term ‘backdoor’ really makes sense in this context.)

It's surveillance of anyone who is receiving money. They don't have to be playing a formal merchant role to be under that surveillance.

The centralised state-run exchange that you have to connect to to make the software useful?

My understanding is that you (the buyer) connect to the exchange to get tokens, and the seller later connects to the exchange to get money for your tokens. The exchange doesn’t know where, how and when you spend your tokens. Where’s the backdoor?

(And I think the exchanges aren’t expected to be run directly by the state, but that’s probably irrelevant to the topic at hand.)

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