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Comment by globalnode | Hacker News Reader

financial privacy is the way you get corruption - i dont care if you dont want anyone to know you spent a bazillion dollars on your yacht, too bad. companies especially dont deserve special consideration in this respect. as a community we could expose corruption and greed at the highest levels if financial privacy ceased to be a thing.

edit: ofc this is what the whole article is about, ive calmed down and read it now :D... still, dont know why these things are allowed to go on

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The issue with financial information being more out in the open is it also strengthens the most powerful incumbents, most notably states.

Credit scores are a good example of a financial privacy violation used to keep the poorest poorer. When the data leaks and people suffer waves of identity theft a slap on the wrist is issued and 5 free years of credit monitoring are handed out. After year 6, well it's the consumers responsibility to pay for that, not the financial data hoarders.

I think the article is more referring to privacy of corporations. Not many poor people are setting up shell companies.

Privacy, like all tools, is neither good nor bad, but depends on the wielder. Same goes for messaging privacy and crime fighting for example.

soooo no crypto?

crypto currency? afaik thats not private but trackable. crypto for general privacy? sure, we have a right to communicate in private what i dont like is financial privacy

Put your money where your mouth is and publish all of your bank and credit card statements.

banks have all this info - its already published to 3rd parties via rewards schemes and tbh i wouldnt be surprised if the banks sell it as well. retailers resell it... none of this data is private. in effect i am publishing it already. but as you say, i would gladly have it all posted online for anybody to see if it meant financial transparency for all.

edit: perhaps i wouldnt like my bank balance published... that may make some individuals targets. in thinking about it perhaps i would prefer financial "transaction" transparency. then we would have to guard against huge cash transactions tho somehow. its clearly a difficult topic but its also the source of a lot of the worlds corruption and misery.

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