Remember the names Arnoud Boot, Peter Hoffmann, Luc Laeven, Lev Ratnovski, as signatories to the death of all privacy and the opening of universal surveillance in all commercial and financial dealings.

Under the remarkably anodyne title "What is Really New in Fintech" and published by the International Monetary Fund blog, these four men proposed that credit ratings be improved by "tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases".

https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-fintech/

Everything you do online, transferred to, assessed, rated, and stored permanently, one would suspect, by that most highly egalitarian and trusted of all institutions, the global financial system.

Arnoud Boot is professor of Corporate Fiance and Financial Markets at the #UniversityOfAmsterdam, in the country whose census records were used during WWII to prosecute the Holocaust on the Netherland's Jewish population. Of 107,000 deported Jews, only 5,200 survived.

Peter Hoffman is an economist working at the Financial Research Division of the #EuropeanCentralBank (#ECB), researching microstructure of financial markets, but apparently neither ethics nor privacy and surveillance.

Luc Laeven is Director-General of the Directorate General Research of the #ECB, and previously worked with the #IMF, #WorldBank, and #ABNAmroBank.

Lev Ratnovski is Sr. Econoist at the #IMF's research department.

These men would sell your entire informational history to gain a few fractions of a percent of interest income.

The banality of evil indeed.

#ArnoudBoot #PeterHoffmann #LucLaeven #LevRatnovski #Surveillance #SurveillanceCapitalism #Privacy #BrowserHistory #SearchHistory #Profiling #Credit #Risk #Holocaust