herseycokguzelolacakIf you had any doubts that Know-Your-Customer laws were evil, here is one very good reason: personal data of 1 BILLION people just leaked.
The core purpose of KYC - to make it harder to launder money, and for the ultra rich to hide away their ill gotten gains - is not evil, far from it.
The fact the very same people which benefit from a perception that KYC is evil, are the same people making the decisions which directly lead to data breaches, is obviously a complete coincidence!
I agree that KYC isn’t inherently evil. But the way its been weaponized is.
For instance in the telecommunications space it make total sense for mitigating spam SMS messages and Robocalls. But the carriers all sell your data for profit. They also don’t protect your data properly and are breached all the time. That’s malicious.
So no, I won’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and agree its an oversimplification to simply call KYC evil. But I also don’t blame people when all they see is abuse and never a good and proper implementation that isn’t exploitative.