Comment by spike021
2 days ago
Was just about to make the same point. Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because you'd be using your debit card and obviously the bank knows all your info.
2 days ago
Was just about to make the same point. Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because you'd be using your debit card and obviously the bank knows all your info.
> Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because ...
Cash would only be an issue if a merchant associated tender used in each sale with the customer. In this scenario, the business is actively working against their customer's interests and would need to be thought of as such.
EDIT:
Assume for a moment a merchant did try to associate tender used with each customer and that all cash transactions are made by people who did a cash withdrawal from only a bank (which is definitely not the case in real life).
How would the merchant establish the identity of each person?
Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
> Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
For at least ten years, Bank of America ATMs have accepted cash deposits. They claim that cash funds deposited at one of their ATMs are immediately available for withdrawal, so BofA must have very high confidence in the accuracy of their bill scanners. I expect that these bill scanners are not the exclusive property of BofA. From this information, a few things seem likely to me:
1) Now that you have those highly-reliable bill scanners, it wouldn't be much work to make them scan and report the serial numbers on each bill.
2) It wouldn't be much work to add those scanners for bills that leave the ATM.
Given that the ATM knows from whose account the cash withdrawal is being made, that's the ATM arm of the automated surveillance system fairly well buttoned up.
It has been ages since I've stepped inside a bank branch, but I remember tellers sometimes using bill counters to double-check their hand counts. If they still do that, then a bank simply orders the tellers to always use the counters and there's where you capture the serial numbers for teller-counter cash withdrawals.
As for data distribution, just use data brokers.
> And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
Nothing? It seems substantially in line with the spirit of lots of existing anti-money-laundering regulations.
The problem is not if a bank can track individual legal tender and associate it with an account holder, but instead if a company which is not a bank (such as a grocery store) could determine same.
In other words, how would a merchant be able to establish a specific $20 USD bill was used by a specific person?
No bank would share this information with an entity other than law enforcement and likely would require a court ordered subpoena to do so.