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>The article goes on to immediately compare KYC with widespread facial recognition. Why are these equivalent

They're both violations of people's privacy.

>There's no evidence provided for these numbers

And KYC proponents provide no empirical evidence that KYC has actually led to a measurable reduction in organised crime. The onus should be on them to demonstrate why it's effective enough to justify the violation of citizens' privacy that it entails.

I'm not defending KYC here (tho I think it is necessary personally). I'm just requesting the author actually try to make an argument.

So is a license plate. Privacy is not an absolute right.

> Privacy is not an absolute right.

This is meaningless.

You mean to say "nothing is an absolute right". Yes. If you want me to be more precise, I'll say that privacy is a lesser right, one that is important but that is nonetheless frequently and deliberately compromised in the service of other rights.

You get to weird places if you try to wrap an entire worldview around privacy the way people do expression or self-determination, because privacy does not have that standing.

Sure, but the fact that KYC is not motivated by data is not a license just to pull numbers out of your ass.

Came here to post this.

Having worked in an industry with strict kyc requirements and worked for a well known payment processor, if they were only catching 1% then some truly absurd amount of business is fraudulent.

Curious about numbers. Many people underestimate the scale of business in general, because they're not good at intuiting extremely large numbers. For example, an abuse tech might see 10,000 pending cases for the month and say "Wow, we catch so much fraud with this technology", but if there are a billion transactions per month, then it's very possible that those 10,000 cases represent only 1% of the million fraudulent transactions and only 1 in a thousand transactions is actually fraudulent.

So if, according to the stats plucked out of thin air, KYC isn't doing enough to stop things they presumably think are bad, I assume the article author wants even stricter controls?

Oh wait, they don't. Just ditch it and let anyone move money around with no controls. I'm sure that would work out fine.

> Just ditch it and let anyone move money around with no controls. I'm sure that would work out fine.

It did, for thousands of years. The only thing that's new is the ability to track every penny and person from cradle to grave and the incessant and ever-growing desire for those in power to control those who aren't.

Hmmmm... I think carrying a lot of gold around and limited transport and security put certain limits on who could do that easily...

One of the reasons people use gold is because carrying it around is actually pretty easy. Eg, wandering the streets with a few million in gold bars is no challenge. You can carry it in a bag and the odds of someone checking your bag for millions of dollars in hard assets is low.

Not to mention that if the gold is banked then it probably didn't need transport because it was being transported too and from a bank.

Ultra-infrequent use case. Hawala and European credit networks largely mooted it.

Well, the OP did say thousands of years. But I take your point, money transfer without moving physical gold has been possible for hundreds of years for sure.

We are taxing more complex transactions (eg. VAT, income, profits, etc.). ie. the vector for laundering is much bigger.

no tax, no control (look at The Emirates).

However, as it gets easier and easier to accrue wealth on behalf of others, the taxing schemes are probably needed, and so is the control.

> It did, for thousands of years

and for thousands of years the rich did pretty much what they wanted, and the rest of us lived barely above subsistence level.. fair taxation is one of the building blocks of modern society

> It did, for thousands of years.

That's like saying going without vaccinations, clean water, or adequate medical care "worked out fine" for thousands of years.

Sure, the human race survived. Many individuals even thrived. But I don't think it's really disputable that life with them is massively better than life was before we had them (or, in fact, than life is now for the far too many who still lack them in a reliable way).

I assume you are being sarcastic. But what you are suggesting is exactly what we need. Why did it be a problem for people to move money around willy nilly? Why do we need controls? We do it mainly to help find criminals, but there are other ways to do that.

No, we don't do it to help find criminals. We do it to make profiting from crime more difficult and expensive, and to help stop funding terrorism.

We also do it to help find criminals. And if the only reason we do it is to stop people from legally moving money around, then we need to stop it. Will criminals and terrorists benefit? Sure, but they can also benefit from other legal things as well, like cell phones and the Internet

> Why did it be a problem for people to move money around willy nilly?

because they could avoid paying their taxes?

Ok. And is the a reason to cripple our entire financial system? People can avoid paying taxes already. Most legal forms of income are already tracked, outside of kyc.

Yes, they could have cited some sources, but the number is spot on. It's an overestimate, even.

https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Studies/Il...

> Globally, it appears that much less than 1% (probably around 0.2%) of the proceeds of crime laundered via the financial system are seized and frozen.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

> the confiscation rate might be 0.07 percent. In other words, despite ubiquitous money laundering controls, criminals retain up to 99.93 percent of criminal proceeds.

that's like saying that nearly nobody robs banks so there's no point having so much security in banks. the real question is what would the figures be if there were no checks?

and KYC isn't only for money laundering, it's also for tax fraud

Clearly we need more money laundering controls then. (/s)