Really? Did we IT people decide giving up privacy for security is a good idea?
https://www.chainalysis.com/blockchain-intelligence/
They also do work to deanonymize other blockchains, including monero.
which they still haven't actually broken despite empty marketing claims which in reality is busting people on KYC CEXs.
Whether or not they've done it by breaking the protocol itself might be of academic concern but is irrelevant in practical terms.
It very much is not. If I use cash to commit a crime but then deposit it into a KYC bank account which is then used as a side channel to get me caught does not mean its the cashes fault.
XMR privacy and anonymity can not protect you from going out of your way to convert it into inferior surveillance currency which then gets you busted.
That's basic logic and should be a obvious technical limitation.
By "practical terms" I mean that a criminal sitting in prison isn't going to care whether the vulnerability that got them there was layer 7 or not. It doesn't fucking matter to them at that point.
Everything on the internet is vulnerable to netflow traffic deanonymization; it is a fundamental limitation with the design of the internet. The only thing that stops these attacks from being more common is the relative difficulty of obtaining the required data.
that is not how they get busted, monero literally has protections against that like ring signature and dandelion. They get busted by leaving xmr monero ecosystem to cash out to surveillance currencies like btc or tether on a KYC CEX.
Again, the anonymity of cash (which isn't that anonymous actually but thats another topic) is useless if you deposit them into a KYC ATM.
They make it incredibly hard to make sense of gathered intel