Until recently we never really thought about our privacy as something we could lose.
We held onto the idea that our governments, reinforced by constitutional or charter rights, would do what they could to uphold the sanctity of the individual, and the privacy this entails. That’s why it came as such a shock to many when we learned that our regulatory agencies have been collecting vast amounts of data on us over the years.
The same is true of corporations, although they’re driven by the demands of advanced capitalism for perpetual profits. The notion that the innocuous voice in your phone is also listening to your conversations, carries a hidden menace virtually unknown to the previous generation.
And this is where the new challenges lie.
Privacy, an inalienable human right, is not a privilege that should be curtailed by regulatory bodies if they deem it in your best interest, or limited by corporations if you don’t pay enough. Unfortunately, though, our right to privacy is constantly under attack by forces that seek to undermine it for their own ends.
Now new challenges posed by advances in blockchain technology, including projects like the metaverse and central bank digital currencies (CBDC) provide a new frontier in the ongoing struggle for privacy, and especially financial privacy. The solution is PriFi, or private decentralized finance. Here’s why it’s so important.
A History of Power Creep
Power creep is the tendency for governments to get a taste of power and refuse to give it up when it’s outlived its usefulness.
A modern example would be the spate of sweeping powers the United States government gave itself in the wake of 9/11. This led to the USA PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, and a host of other social ills, which the United States population conceded too because they were at war, and a temporary abrogation of their civil liberties was acceptable if the outcome was enhanced security.
The problem is the powers that be didn’t exactly scale back the power once it had served its usefulness. We see that in Edward Snowden’s revelations, and echoes of it today, especially lately with the heavy-handed measures taken to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
And that’s only the North American angle. The situation is far worse in China where we’ve seen the implementation of a social credit system and the launch of the world’s first central-bank backed digital currency, the Digital Yuan.
China is inadvertently showing world governments a new avenue towards obtaining more power and control over their citizens through observance and reactions to their financial decision-making.
The irony about the greater pursuit of social control is that the United States and China each believe they’re doing what’s best for their citizens. Now the introduction of new technologies, including blockchain, will provide them with another avenue to ensure that their citizens are doing the right things, spending their money in the right places, and thinking the right thoughts, for their own good.
But regulators aren’t the only force out there aiming for control.
Corporations and Control
In advanced capitalism the shareholder is king. The king has certain expectations placed upon him from shareholders. One of which is a respectable return on investment year over year, which means the king must be provided profits in perpetuity. This demand is in direct defiance of natural law. Nothing grows forever. But if perpetual growth doesn’t happen then it’s never the system to blame, it’s the company.
That puts the onus on the company’s leadership to find a way around this problem. Sometimes accomplishing this goal requires companies stepping into moral and civil gray areas, all too often leaving privacy as collateral damage.
Some of the abrogations of our privacy have been obvious and shocking, like the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, where hundreds of data points were easily extracted without our explicit consent. Other times it hasn’t been quite so obvious, including the release of so-called personal assistants—Siri, Cortana, and Alexa—in your phones and in your houses to track your movements, listen to your conversations, and collect data to improve advertising algorithms.
Attacks on personal privacy have been so commonplace over the past ten years that it almost seems as if there’s a concerted campaign being waged by Silicon Valley. A campaign designed to rebrand privacy as a privilege that can be bought and sold, expensive and generally only accessible by the wealthy, corporations, or regulatory bodies – rather than the human right it is.
Now you might be asking yourself what does all of this have to do with blockchain and financial privacy? The answer is everything.
The Rise of Digital Panopticism
George Orwell could never have foretold the sheer amount of telescreens we have watching us at any given moment. There’s Facebook and Twitter, our phones tracking us every moment of the day. But now there’s also the metaverse, with the metadata from our purchase of NFTs, cryptocurrency, and everything else we use to outfit our private realm—a virtual cornucopia for big data to feast upon.
The internet is a historic and important battleground for privacy, and blockchain is where everything will be won or lost in this zero-sum contest of wills. The weapons used against privacy? Blockchain metadata and CBDC’s. Our privacy protectors? Protocols like Monero and Haven Protocol.
You see, as we progress forward with blockchain technology, CBDC’s stand as one of the biggest threats to privacy and civil liberties to date, carrying the ability to weaponize blockchain’s transparency against the citizen. The transparency would give regulatory bodies and corporations alike, complete access to nearly all financial and decision-making data.
The effect is what we could call digital panopticism; a prison in which everyone is detained to be freely observed by the keepers of the keys but is never knowingly watched. At least until they are prosecuted for their decisions.
Panopticism relates back to the conception of the perfect prison by 16th century British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. He posited that the prison would be circular with all eyes facing the center, from where an obelisk would rest. None could see in the obelisk, but the obelisk in theory could see everyone. So it was anyone’s guess as to whether or not the guards inside the obelisk were watching at any given time.
Update that to today’s standards, where the obelisk observing our behavior would be regulatory bodies peering in at the blockchain of their CBDC. Watching for financial decisions they deem ‘antisocial’ or ‘inappropriate’ and reacting with ‘corrective suggestions’, restrictions, or complete lockdowns.
This redirects a market notion of value towards the ends of regulators and produces undue influence on the conduct of market activities.
The panopticon measure is further enhanced by the fact that the blockchain is immutable, rendering all of your ‘antisocial’ or ‘inappropriate’ decisions encoded and unchangeable forever. So even if the ‘guard’ isn’t peering out at you at the moment, they will find you eventually.
If this seems far-fetched, remember that China is already on the path to doing this.
No, we’re not there yet. We haven’t followed China’s lead down the rabbit hole to completely controlled societies, but that doesn’t mean we should rest and take our financial privacy for granted.
Take for example Canadas decision to freeze the bank accounts of ‘Freedom Convoy’ truckers, no matter which side of the Covid debate you sit, this should be a red flag to everyone.
Be it a continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic or perhaps the threat of another war with an as-yet-unrealized political enemy, we do not have to look far to see the lengths regulators will go to to meet their ends. Regulatory bodies will look towards more restrictions and control based on whatever crisis we endure next—whatever suits the narrative. The advancement of the panopticon.
That is unless we have PriFi. That is unless we take steps to safeguard our natural human right to privacy.
All Is Not Lost
The battle for the future of financial privacy is not yet lost.
We’ve only seen the opening salvos in this conflict, in truth. They were fired when China unleashed its digital currency onto its people and the rest of the world took pause.
But data continues to flow, undetectable by those that would seek to stop or divert it. Fueled by a new dawn in crypto where projects like Haven Protocol—(A stablecoin coin like Luna’s $UST but with bulletproof privacy) set a new course..
There are those who are rising to fill the demand for more autonomy in our private lives. Those who believe PriFi is a solution in our battle for financial privacy.
You’ve taken the first step of awareness, how you proceed from here, depends on you.
To learn more about PriFi and how you can safeguard your financial data connect with the community at Haven.
Author bio
Harlequin
Once Harlequin discovered crypto in 2014, the question ‘what is money’ took hold and Harlequin became fascinated by the possibilities of decentralising trust. Working in the tech industry, it was clear to Harlequin that we all have very little privacy in the digital world. What was challenging was how oblivious the average person is to the dangers of this. Harlequin wanted to change this. Upon discovering Haven, these two passions collided and the concept of a private stablecoin ecosystem immediately made sense. Harlequin is committed to understanding and promoting tools that we can use to preserve our privacy and our freedom, and is passionate about educating others in the space. If you’re interested in joining the conversation and learning more about PriFi stablecoins, you can learn more by going here: https://havenprotocol.org/