Re:Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
by ETH_start on Saturday October 24, 2026 @01:35AM
(#50218580)
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.
Re:Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
by F3nd0 on Saturday October 24, 2026 @01:56AM
(#50218663)
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.)
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.