Your Card Already Does Everything You Are Afraid Of.

FRANKFURT — Our correspondent paid for a haircut, a prescription, a train ticket and two drinks.

Then she filed subject-access requests on every organisation she could identify that might hold a record of it.

Five came back inside the statutory period. One came back after a reminder.

What they held

The amount. The time, to the second. The merchant. The merchant's category — which is a four-digit code that says pharmacy or bar whether or not you would like it to.

And, in four of the six, the location, because a terminal has one.

She had not consented to any of it in any way she can remember. She had tapped a card.

The clause everybody reads

Every account of the coming instrument quotes the same worry: that money could be made programmable. That it could expire. That it could be restricted to certain purchases, or switched off.

That is a real property a designer could build. It is not the property this design describes, and the published documents say so at length.

Reporting that is not the same as promising it, and this newspaper is not promising it. A design document is not a system.

The clause nobody reads

Deep in the same material is the offline section, and it is the most interesting thing in the whole file.

It describes two people transferring value directly between certified devices, with the transaction visible to the payer and the payee and to nobody else.

That is not an improvement on a card. That is a description of cash.

Why that matters more than the surveillance argument

Because the surveillance argument is over. It was lost fifteen years ago, quietly, at tills, by everybody, without a vote.

Cash does not disclose. It is the only instrument most people have ever held that discloses nothing to anybody, and it has been leaving high streets steadily since about 2010 — not because anybody legislated it away, but because a card is easier and a shop pays a fee to accept one and the fee is worth it.

Two of the three shopkeepers our correspondent spoke to would rather take cash. Both take cards. Their reasons were about fees, not freedom, and one of them laughed at the question.

So the question worth asking about a new public instrument is not whether it watches you. Almost everything already does.

It is whether it can be spent with nobody else in the room.

The objection we could not answer

Professor Anneliese Obuya-Sandström read our draft and objects to the headline, and her reply runs in full at the foot of this page.

Her argument, which this desk thinks is correct: pointing at an old harm to soothe a worry about a new one is not reassurance, it is two harms.

And the distinction that actually matters is not who sees a payment but who can refuse one, and on what basis. A private issuer refusing you is commercial and appalling and appealable to a phone number. A sovereign issuer refusing you would be political, and the appeal route would be political too.

Those are different, and our headline flattens them. We have printed her saying so directly underneath it.

What we would tell a reader to do

Read the offline annex. It is public, it is dull, and it is the part that decides whether the thing is cash or a better card.

And in the meantime, if the disclosure bothers you: it is happening now, to you, several times a day, and you can find out exactly what is held by asking, which took our correspondent one afternoon and six emails.

She was more unsettled by what came back than by anything in the rulebook.