Yes, but that is by design. Taler promises to protect the buyer’s privacy, not the merchant’s. That is very explicitly stated.
When you say ‘GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying’, that implies to me that it provides secret means of accessing private information to a third party. That is not true, since the party in question is directly involved in the system and there is no expectation of privacy guaranteed via technological means. Calling that ‘a backdoor’ is very misleading.
There is such an expectation for the customer, where it would make sense to speak of a backdoor if there was one, but there isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, and since it’s all libre software, anyone can verify this.
When you say ‘GNU Taler provides a backdoor for spying’, that implies to me that it provides secret means of accessing private information to a third party. That is not true, since the party in question is directly involved in the system and there is no expectation of privacy guaranteed via technological means. Calling that ‘a backdoor’ is very misleading.
There is such an expectation for the customer, where it would make sense to speak of a backdoor if there was one, but there isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, and since it’s all libre software, anyone can verify this.