> You mention 'first world narratives' I don't see India complaining about payment issues or surveillance.
I mean, I realize people have weird connotations associated with this phrase--and maybe it should be put out of its misery (but I will remind you that you're the one that started us down using this terminology, not me: I only talked about the "first world" because YOU--not ME--decided to start talking about the "third world", when you decided to pre-attack a strawman) but India is considered the "third world", not the "first world". I can't tell if I struck a nerve there, but I meant "the Western Bloc".
https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/third_world_countries...
Regardless, UPI doesn't offer privacy, as like... that just isn't within the scope of the design criteria for authoritarians such as yourself. On the other side of that particular divide, those of us disagree with the surveillance state, that makes all of this tech you are enamored with a non-starter: I want decentralized and private money--something at least as, if not MORE, private than paper cash--because I actually believe us non-terrorists deserve privacy despite the clear existence of terrorists.
https://scroll.in/article/1045536/are-your-upi-payments-farm...
> On February 22, while returning from his morning run, Kiran Jonnalagadda, a technologist, went to buy a coffee from a cafe in Indiranagar in Bengaluru. When the cashier asked him for his phone number while billing, Jonnalagadda refused. However, after making the payment, he was surprised that he got a message on his number from the merchant’s bank, thanking him for making the payment.
Yeah: I fundamentally don't believe that anyone--including my bank--should know who I am making payments with. I don't want anyone--including my bank--to be able to discern things about my sexual orientation or my medical conditions based on where and when I make payments. I continue to believe that everyone, everywhere, should have the right to such privacy, and that a world with a CBDC--or where all payments are made via cards and digital mechanisms such as your beloved UPI--fundamentally undermines that right.
> Several privacy experts have pointed out that this data sharing is part of UPI’s architecture, which is premised on collecting huge amounts of data from users and sharing it with multiple participants involved in a particular transaction. Being data-centric is one of the reasons, they say, UPI can sustain without any fees, as opposed to other digital payments, such as card transactions, which cost money.
Ugh. I mean, this is so much worse than I even thought this was going to be... and you seriously want this? You want the entire world to turn into the full-on dystopian version of surveillance capitalism, with every transaction being data-mined and where we are perpetually the product instead of the true consumer? This is just horrible, and if the occasional grift that comes with crypto is the price we have to pay to avoid this kind of authoritarian viewpoint, then I'm going to have to side with crypto.
> The amount of data shared on the digital spending habits of consumers is significantly more in UPI as compared to traditional forms of digital transactions. “In a card payment system, such as credit cards, there are fewer parties,” Lakshmanan explained. “Further, the data stored is not identifiable, since it stores credit card numbers, that too in a redacted fashion.”