Every EV charging network has a privacy policy. None of them can offer anonymity. The reason is not corporate indifference. It is arithmetic.
If a driver has to pay for a charge, the network has to know who the driver is. Payment requires an account, or a card, or at minimum a tokenized credential that resolves back to a financial institution which knows exactly who you are. The network can promise to handle that identifier carefully. It can promise to retain it briefly, encrypt it thoroughly, and share it sparingly. What it cannot do is not create it.
Bill Maurer, an anthropologist at UC Irvine who has studied payment systems for two decades, makes the point that how you pay is never just plumbing. In How Would You Like to Pay? (Duke University Press, 2015) he argues that each way of paying sets up a different relationship between the people involved. Digital payment, in particular, took away the anonymity that cash used to carry, and threw off a great deal of data in the process.
That is the arithmetic. Cash was anonymous not because anyone designed it to be, but because settling a debt with a physical token requires no record of who held it. Every payment method that replaced cash reintroduced the record, because the record is how the settlement works.
That distinction is the subject of Hector Amaya’s new book, The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification (Stanford University Press, 2026). Amaya, a professor of communication at USC Annenberg, makes a point that the privacy debate has largely skipped: while enormous scholarly attention has gone to surveillance, datafication, and privacy, comparatively little has gone to theorizing anonymity itself.
Nick Couldry, in a jacket endorsement for the book, glosses Amaya’s central move as understanding anonymity as indexical dissociation. The gloss is Couldry’s, not Amaya’s own phrasing, though it names the mechanism cleanly.
An index is a pointer. A charging session that requires payment creates a pointer from the kilowatt-hours delivered to a named human being. Once that pointer exists, everything downstream is policy: who can follow it, for how long, under what legal process, subject to which retention schedule. Good policy is genuinely valuable. It is also revocable, breachable, and subject to change of control when the network is acquired.
Indexical dissociation is different in kind. It is not a rule about who may follow the pointer. It is the absence of the pointer.
The obvious objection is that a paid network could simply build better technology. Encrypt harder, hold less, design the identity out. Computer scientists have been trying since the 1990s, and the results are instructive.
Every workable design ends up in the same place. You can hide the driver’s identity from the network, from the merchant, from everyone in the ordinary course of business. But somebody has to be able to undo it, because the money has to be traceable when a court, a regulator, or a fraud investigator asks. So the designs appoint a referee who holds the key: uninvolved day to day, able to unlock the identity when there is proper cause. Camenisch, Maurer and Stadler set out a version of this in 1997, and the basic shape has held ever since.
A referee who can never unlock anything is not a referee. So the best anonymity available in a paid system is anonymity somebody can switch off. That is not a shortcoming of the engineering. It follows from the fact that money has to be settled, and settlement means somebody, somewhere, can trace it.
Where Plunk sits
Plunk EV deploys Level 2 chargers at no cost to the host and no cost to the driver. Revenue comes from compliance credits under Canada’s Clean Fuel Regulations and British Columbia’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard. The driver never transacts.
There is no account to open because there is nothing to bill. There is no card on file because no card is presented. There is no payment processor in the loop because there is no payment. A Plunk charger delivers energy to a vehicle without the network learning, or needing to learn, who is standing at the connector.
This is not a privacy feature that was added. It is a category of information that the business model never generates.
If and when Plunk offers an app, the same logic has to govern it. An app can do useful things: locate a charger, report a fault, confirm availability, surface session history for the driver’s own use. What it must never do is become the gate: the app is never required to charge, and never an obstacle to charging. Optional enrichment, not a toll booth. The moment an app becomes mandatory, the anonymity that the revenue model made possible gets thrown away for no reason at all.
The honest counterweight
Amaya does not romanticize anonymity. His argument holds that anonymity carries paradoxical possibilities, experienced sometimes as freedom and other times as powerlessness or subjugation. Being unindexed is not automatically emancipatory. Being unindexed can also mean being unrecognized, unserved, and unable to make a claim.
Anonymity is only a benefit when the service is available unconditionally. Anonymous exclusion is worse than identified access. A driver who cannot charge is not liberated by the fact that nobody recorded the failure.
The free and unconditional part is therefore load-bearing. Anonymity that comes with a service you can always use is freedom. Anonymity that comes with a service you can be quietly denied is the other thing Amaya describes.
Amaya makes the trust argument in a harder setting in “The Cultures of Anonymity and Violence in the Mexican Blogosphere” (International Journal of Communication, 2017), he examines Mexican citizen journalists for whom anonymity functioned as a necessary mechanism for constructing a place of trust and safety. The stakes there were mortal, and the comparison to charging an EV in a grocery store parking lot should not be overdrawn. The mechanism is nonetheless the same one: non-identification producing trust rather than eroding it.
Two different promises
A paid network offers conditional privacy. It collects an identifier because it must, and then undertakes to treat that identifier well. That undertaking is a contract, and its value depends entirely on the contracting party’s competence, solvency, and ownership remaining stable.
A free network can offer structural anonymity. No transaction, therefore no identifier, therefore no undertaking required. There is nothing to promise because there is nothing to protect.
The second is not a better version of the first. It is a different claim, made possible by a different revenue model. Compliance credit revenue under CFR and LCFS is usually discussed in terms of what it lets us build and where. Amaya’s framework suggests it also determines something about what the driver becomes at the point of use: a customer with an account, or someone with a car.
Hector Amaya, “The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification,” Stanford University Press, 2026, 310 pages, ISBN 9781503645813.
Nick Couldry (London School of Economics and Political Science), publisher’s endorsement, Stanford University Press catalogue listing: sup.org/books/media-studies/economy-anonymity.
Bill Maurer, “How Would You Like to Pay? How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money,” Duke University Press, 2015, 176 pages, ISBN 9780822359999.
Jan Camenisch, Ueli Maurer and Markus Stadler, “Digital Payment Systems with Passive Anonymity-Revoking Trustees,” Journal of Computer Security, vol. 5 no. 1, 1997.
