[Margaret Pilkington]

It seems that (here anyway) even young children have their own card....called Go Henry....this is to get them used to saving/spending/using a card.
Parents/grandparents/others can electronically transfer money to these accounts....thereby inculcating even young children into the 'normality' of cashless society.....but to keep track of the account,you need a smartphone.
So not just the money is tracked, the child is too.
And you might think that this is a good thing....and you could be right, but again it fosters a dependence on technology...technology that can be hacked or could fail, leaving these youngsters with little idea of how to cope without their electronic brain

That all sounds very negative and it shows some of my bias creeping in.
I cannot help my bias....I am a cynical old baggage and I can see the negatives and not much of the positives. It is hard to see positives for something that I have very little use for, and which destroys social interaction, the humanity of social contact without 'social media'....real face to face conversations using real language, not textspeak.

All that said, it is just a couple of weeks ago I was tempted for maybe a nanosecond into getting a smartphone.
It seems that any transaction carried out on the internet, now requires authorisation.
My bank will accept a land line number, PayPal will not.
I thought about the way round this, but right now am still wrestling with it.
It may mean that PayPal lose my account.....that would be sad as I use it a fair bit.....but maybe I could learn to live without it.