It probably will, for the most part, and, along with it, a little corner of privacy. It's a small one, and defeatable, but it takes effort on the adversary's part to gather that info, rather than being real time and retrievable at whim.
- kids will have even less opportunities to be kids. We are creating a word where they can't screw around. It's terrible for their growth.
- you have no workaround for any situation that doesn't fit the box perfectly. No way to speeds things up. Removing by passes mean a rigid and unforgivable system.
- you remove any possibility to try alternative systems, since by definition alternatives don't work in the way the current one does. Actually they often offend the current system. But you need those alternative to exists over-wise, you get stuck.
- of course, it also means morality is going to become law. Unable to hide, people leaving differently will be exposed.
- you'll get dependent on electronics. It means you need to have the privilege to have access to equipment and services otherwise you are excluded from society. Also in case of infrastructure failure, society is on hold.
This not a "little corner of privacy", it's "a huge part of what's allow us to function in this imperfect world".
An imperfect system needs workarounds. It's very important. Otherwise you'll get worst than a Gilliam's Brazil dystopia.
> How is the screwing around related to cash? Can you elaborate?
Kids need to do forbidden things hidden from adults to grow. They need experiment. Make mistakes. Create their own set of values and ability to solve problem independently. Without cash, it increases the number of things they can't do without their parents. E.G: buying birth control, consuming illegal products, going out in places the parents disagree with, etc.
No parents are perfect. All of them are wrong on some things, and have some kind of unbalance in the way they interact with the children. It's life. Growing for kids mean learning from their parents, and learning to distance themself from their parents. Two sides of the same coin.
> An imperfect system needs workarounds.
Say you are in an saoudi dictatorship. Without cash, paying for drinks at a secret gay bar becomes very hard. It's the same for us. They are many things our system frown uppon. That doesn't mean it's bad.
Another thing: you are an administrator, and you know you can fix the school door now with cash and create a fake paper trail later. Or pay the right way and wait 6 months.
Obviously our system should be fixed. Cash is not the solution. But changing the system is a hard, long and unreliable process. So meanwhile, cash helps to get along.
> Without cash, it increases the number of things they can't do without their parents.
I always had a debit card and bank account, and in my teens I withdrew cash and spent it. You are probably right that I would have thought twice about some of those spends if I knew my parents could see the transactions (which they would since I wasn't 18).
> Say you are in an saoudi dictatorship. Without cash, paying for drinks at a secret gay bar becomes very hard. It's the same for us.
Can't disagree here: eletronic money with a paper trail requires not just stable and trustworthy government and public institutions, it requires some trust also that future governments and institutions are trustworthy.
The tradeoff between convenience and privacy is always a factor, and if lack of privacy is lack of security then the choice is clear.
I think the solution to many of these problems is simply "cash on card". You have a debit card connected to your bank account, but you can transfer a sum to "virtual cash" on the card. That then works like cash, but without the cash. It could be cryptographically based for example, and would mean the receiver of the transaction doeesn't see the source. And on a statement from the account it only shows up as the withdrawal when the e-cash was purchased.
