I’ve been in India for a while now, to support family member as she’s here for medical reasons. I rely on online services to save on cash especially that it’s hard to carry cash from my country (for “security” reasons, as most airports limit how much cash you can carry).
Yet, many online services are giving me hell with their “smart” anti fraud detection and things like that, at this point I can really understand the position of the people who are dooming about cashless society, because at some point here I felt trapped not being able to get services I needed so much (until I asked shop owner to pay for me and I paid him in cash + small profit…).
The thing is, the attitude of these companies is so frustrating; like if my card was already accepted once and I successfully approved the payment via 3D secure with my bank, who are you (as a random online service) to assume you can act as my big brother? Even more, if I’m using a balance paid by gift card, who give Amazon or other services the right to put my account on hold while it still contains my hard earned money (I had to try literally multiple services just to buy expensive gift card as Amazon payment won’t allow me to choose the correct currency of my Card). Mind you, I’m just a random guy and not world class criminal, or an Activist who’s being actively targeted, this make me wonder what these services can do once we go completely cashless.
Simple tasks like downloading region-specific Indian apps become unnecessarily complex, as Google play have this “smart” rule that says I can only change my region once per year, what?? It’s just an app just give me the apk, and you can just ask for my location! (I had to install the apks from some random websites at risk of getting some malware…).
I would said what this experience taught me as a developer, but it won’t matter, as most products are designed to help the stake holders and upper managers and even Governments, and a dev’s empathy won’t matter much…
Apologies for this vent, but I really felt I need to post something about this frustrating situation I’m in.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
I experienced very similar challenges moving from Spain to the US, from being locked out of apps and unable to update anything through Google’s app store to being unable to make purchases on PayPal and in Amazon, since everything on my phone/in my account was linked to another region.
The issue is that I don’t think this is a “bug” in a cashless system, I think it is a “feature” that serves big banks, big data, and software providers. If you want to set up a new life or change your online behavior by necessity, with a cashless system you are forced to give companies everything they could ever want to track you and everything they need to link your history in one country to your new accounts in another. If they didn’t have 60 different ways to force you into creating these accounts and going through them to make minor changes, people could travel and purchase freely without their banks or apps ever knowing where they live permanently or if their financial situations have changed. But now, you have to directly give them that info to use your own money and apps. And they have no incentive to make it convenient.