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And Visa and MasterCard aren't surveiled? Isn't one of their selling points that they surveil every transaction and automatically block anything suspicious? And increasingly, the parameters for suspicious include anything pornographic or even 'pornographic' (see: the bullying of steam to remove explicit games).
At least with Pix, the costs get lower for the end users.
The thing about US' corporate suveillance system, and why the US government is so tolerant about it, is that US government branches either buy or are given all the data they need.
You don't get government surveillance or corporate surveillance, you get government surveillance or government and corporate surveillance.
Lack of capabilities limit the scope of government tyranny. It used to be that the government didn't have the manpower required to audit everyone and everything, so only the bank transactions above some threshold would be monitored. With pix, they are monitoring 100% of transactions now. This is a massive gain in capability that should not be ignored.
First, I don't think they are.
Second, good - they should have an _algorithm_ checking every transaction. MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me; the government could catch all the money laundering that is the lifeblood of crime, or maybe just finally eradicate tax evasion, the necessary first step towards rationalizing our tax code and one of the core issues of our country?
Your opinions read like you have misplaced worries, if not values.
100% of pix transactions are unconditionally sent to government bodies for monitoring. It's not an algorithmic "only if it matches some criteria" affair.
What they're actually doing with the data is anyone's guess. They could be doing anything. The tax department is no doubt going to be the first part of the brazilian government to adopt AI. Who knows what other creative uses they're going to find for it?
> MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me
And we should be making it illegal for them to do that, not compounding the problem by piling on equivalent government functionality on top of it. The problem is supposed to be fixed, not replaced with a national version.
> the government could catch all the money laundering that is the lifeblood of crime
The optimal amount of money laundering, fraud, crime, are all non-zero. You can "catch all the money laundering" quite easily, just install a totalitarian state panopticon where everybody is guilty by default and constantly surveilled by an omniscient intelligence apparatus, problem solved.
You're going to need to accept some amount of crime if you want to have some semblance of freedom and basic human dignity.
You are confusing transaction authorization done by card networks/issuers with the kind of fraud analysis that happens post settlement and requires correlating multiple transactions and accounts
> the government could catch all the money laundering
No, you don’t have enough information in transactions alone to identify all money laundering, specially the sophisticated kind.
I’m not sure how that’s even relevant to the point I was trying to make which is: you are monitored by a foreign and openly hostile government through its privately owned collaborators. That’s worse than your own government using transactional data to monitor money laundering and tax evasion activities that detracts from your direct quality of life. And again, it’s naive to think Brasil has no control over the internet backbone in its own territory, you must not understand how it even works to say something like that.
> Lack of capabilities limit the scope of government tyranny. It used to be that the government didn't have the manpower required to audit everyone and everything, so only the bank transactions above some threshold would be monitored. With pix, they are monitoring 100% of transactions now. This is a massive gain in capability that should not be ignored.
And yet here you are arguing against something that decreases the amount of potential bad actors who can gain direct access to your data. It’s the digital age for a while now, there is a general privacy tradeoff in anything you do online. If that’s a concern, use money. My issue with you is that, again, you seem to prefer to hand over your data to foreigners that have no incentive to use it for anything other than extracting as much value as possible out of your country AND with the additional criminally flagrant behavior of inflicting their interests on judicial and political decisions AND make your pay a 3 fucking percent charge over it.
> And Visa and MasterCard aren't surveiled?
Who is doing the surveilling is the difference. In the latter, the surveillance is done by the private sector, in aims of better targeted advertising.
In the former, it's done by either the government or by a government-tied organization, and thus invites a left-hand-passes-to-right-hand scenario, wherein the data & metadata obtained from the system could be passed to law enforcement for prosecution (doubly so if the transactions could be bundled as evidence).
> Isn't one of their selling points that they surveil every transaction and automatically block anything suspicious? And increasingly, the parameters for suspicious include anything pornographic or even 'pornographic' (see: the bullying of steam to remove explicit games).
The censorship pressures made onto Visa & Mastercard was done not by the government, but by PACs & non-governmental organizations. It is through the use of "think of the children" that they push them into censoring transactions, under the implicit threat that lawsuits will be filed if such transactions remain allowed.
Doesn't mean they will automatically expose you, as it requires justice approval technically...
As I said, I'm not defending credit card companies here. Just pointing out the fact that there are problems with pix. It's not the silver bullet people think it is.
And yes, it is worse when the public sector does it. You can actually use the government to fight the private sector when it screws you over. When the government does it, then it's just the system working as intended.
Visa and Mastercard are 300% surveilled: once by the Brazilian government, once by the payment providers themselves, and then finally by the American government.
There are privacy implications of cashless societies, but these foreign companies are worse in every aspect.
All financial institutions are surveilled and regulated. There's a reason Patio 11 describe the industry as an "arm of the government".
But furthermore, his argument is not about surveillance (which he accepts when he describes the central bank as the regulator) but about the competition.
It's the very idea of something being provided as a public good that is considered "anormal" and "anti-competitive" here.