The original note, as written at the time
Did you know that Mobile Money agents are able to detect which people have money on their accounts and how much? It is therefore critical that this is fixed by adding a proximity factor for mobile money transactions. If the agent is too far away, they cannot check any account.
Ongoing development
Mobile money agents are able to see who has money on their accounts and how much. That has to be fixed with a proximity factor: if the agent is too far away, they cannot check any account.
The observation is accurate and it is a serious privacy failure that almost nobody has been told about. An agent terminal sits in a shop where the whole neighbourhood passes, and the person operating it can look up balances — which means the shopkeeper knows who has been paid, who has not, and who is carrying what.
In a small economy that is not a data leak. It is a change in the balance of power on a street, because knowing that your neighbour has money is knowing who to ask, who to pressure, who to rob.
The proximity rule is a good and cheap fix, and its logic is worth stating: an agent is entitled to know about a transaction they are part of, not about a person who happens to be nearby. The technical version is a short-range handshake — the customer’s device must be present for the query — which makes the terminal a point-of-sale rather than a search engine.
The harder half is disclosure. A person should be able to see who has looked at their account, and the answer should be short. Any system where the answer is long is a system with a problem.
And the rule should be enforced by the network rather than by the terminal, because a terminal can be modified.
Proximity is not a technical nicety. It is the difference between a shop and a surveillance post.