“If we want the digital Euro to become a success, we need a clear and convincing narrative of why we need it in the first place. People need to see the benefits of a digital Euro in their day-to-day lives. The European Central Bank and the European Commission have yet to make a compelling case of why we need the digital Euro and what added value it will deliver,” explained Markus Ferber MEP, the EPP Group Spokesman in the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee.
I think it is supposed to be untracable in the same way cash is. It’s even supposed to be usable offline.
Whether or not they will accomplish this is yet to be seen.
being a pessimist here for a second:
once this reaches a more mature stage, there will be somebody claiming it would be used when selling drugs or other illegal activities and those privacy concerns will go out the window :/
I think that’s not that pessimistic.
I don’t expect there to be good privacy straight from the start, no matter what they say right now.
That would be nice and eliminate my main fear in regards to this. Do you have any info on how that is supposed to work?
Nothing is decided yet, according to their website:
They just have announced their plans, but its still many years away
Then why do they want it?
There is a whole website to explain that. Specifically, there is a PDF under the “Why might we need a digital euro?” section, but also this interview says similar things.
If you want something like that, take a look at GNU Taler. https://www.taler.net
That doesn’t make it more privately friendly. After all, you need a way to attest that the payment has actually happened, and that the money was valid, which is much harder (or impossible) to do in a privacy-guaranteeing way without a central authority (like servers from the ECB).
Even if all states in the EU are friendly and don’t use our data for evil things, or block us from paying due to invalid reasons, a payment system without privacy by design is still not ok. By implementing such a payment system, the EU supports similar systems being used in suppressive governments, as those can then use the EU doing the same as justification. And, of course, there’s no guarantee that the whole EU would stay 100% friendly.