An interesting "case" came up in the Australian Parliament the other day, where a member (MP) told how he was having breakfast at a cafe with his kids before school, and his card didn't work. After arranging for someone to get his kids to school, he finally got through to the bank, which informed him that they needed to verify his driver's license, so to get his attention, they locked his accounts.
Nice work.
Now how knows how crypto people feel.
After bringing this up, others then told their own stories, of getting trapped in carparks and restaurants, and getting embarrassed as if they were unable to pay their bills. A small inconvenience perhaps, but it speaks to the power of control that a bank has over our lives - a corporation.
This are quotes from the MP:
“For the convenience of the bank wanting to know what your ID was, even if you had been banking with them for decades, they could switch off your banking like that. Disconnect you from your ability to be a part of your economy.”
He argued it warranted suspicion into how digital identification is used in the banking sector and customers’ vulnerability in the digital economy.
“At the heart of this is trust,”
Buddy... you are in for a world of pain. You are starting to sound like a crypto supporter. Especially since this conversation is centered around digital identification to combat "money laundering". But interestingly, the majority of money laundering is performed in cahoots with the banks themselves. The estimation is that between 2 - 4% of the global GDP is transferred through laundering. For the banks not to know, is impossible, as this short article might hint at. Yet, in the "fight" against money launderers, they are forcing everyone to go through the institutions that enable it for oversight.
The logic is unsound.
But, this has nothing to do with money laundering at all. It is about control over the masses, being able to track and restrict through digital gateways who can do what, when, with their "own" money. It is about being able to better categorize and follow the flows of money, to see opportunity to skim even more from the masses, using automated algorithms that will ensure the maximization of profits.
They keep saying that there will be "strong privacy provisions", but what does this actually mean, when the corporations we aren't private to, are the ones who are taking advantage of knowing who we are. Again, this is illogical. Not only that, banks are for profit corporations, yet we are being forced to use them, to be their customers, if we are to be part of an economy, which of course, we have to be.
To legally walk down the street, you have to wear Nike, Adidas or Puma shoes.
It is overreach, isn't it? But, it does point to the concerns of the governments, where they are not for the wellbeing of citizens, they are there for the benefit of the corporations. While we pay our taxes, they use them to enable more profits, and consolidation of wealth into the hands of the very few.
Remember the "Panama papers" scandal?
Did anyone get punished for the Panama Papers?
U.S. taxpayer Harald Joachim von der Goltz was convicted of wire and tax fraud, money laundering, and a host of other crimes relating to the Panama Papers scandal. He was sentenced to four years in a U.S. federal prison. Time will tell who else will be charged in connection with this scandal.
But, that individual was not the only one. The person who uncovered it:
Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia
(26 August 1964 – 16 October 2017) was a Maltese writer, journalist, blogger and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta and was known internationally for her investigation of the Panama Papers, and subsequent assassination by car bomb.
When it comes to "privacy" pretty much nothing we do digitally is private, because a corporation of some kind is always collecting our information and even if not identifiable directly, can cross-reference it with thousands of other points of data to know who we are. Even if we are hidden from each other at our surface level, we are completely naked below the surface. Digital identification looks to leverage our nudity, collecting all of our information into a digital avatar that can have pressure applied to it like a Kewpie Doll, when behavioral control is required. We saw it applied over the last few years, for instance where Canadians protesting lockdowns had their bank accounts frozen.
There is much more to this than the inconvenience of not being able to pay for breakfast or get out of a carpark, it is about mass population control. And with the increasing application of AI systems, it will be algorithm based, applying rules to all, and those who do not comply, will be punished, and no one will know, except the one harmed by the algorithm.
It is another way we are being divided, being disconnected from each other, unable to see what is happening at a meta level, because we are compartmentalized, shoe-boxed into an individual environment, and as long as we don't do anything "wrong", we won't notice the change.
But, what is wrong?
Participating in any kind of resistance to mass control.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Posted Using InLeo Alpha
It's all about control. I remember wanting to withdraw €5k a couple of years ago. Went to the bank office counter and they told me I could only take 3K as I did not warn them in advance. Later in the morning I was at another town and decided to go to the local office of the same bank to get the other 2K. After they introduced my ID in the computers the alarm started to sound all over the office and they told me they could not do it due to security restrictions and sent me to the office in my town. It was so embarrassing, I felt like a thief trying to steal my own money from an account I have had for 20 years. Of course I ended up closing the account days later.
That is insane, isn't it? No access to your own money and the amount isn't even "that great" in terms of money laundering, where billions are being put through with great consistency.
Oh man that's nuts. I actually switched credit card companies recently because of this same bullshit. I was a customer of theirs for a significant amount of time and they were demanding I provide extra information that was quite frankly none of their fucking business. I stood my ground though and said fuck you, you're not getting this information. I feel for the guy who this happened to and it definitely needs to be more of a concern for more people. Everything is about "safety" these days but we know that is a huge load of horse shit!
We are absolutely being led into a digital panopticon, where we don't have the keys to get out but there are many who do, who lead us in and then slam the door behind them. I wonder what the best way is to get out and opt out of that bullshit.
At some point though, every bank will force it, because they will be allowed to force it on us. It is pathetic, yet people often take the "If you don't do anything wrong" approach, as if "what is wrong" is static. The governments will keep changing the rules in the favor of corporations.
I think we are exploring that now with crypto. It comes down to demonetizing centralized currencies, in favor of decentralized. Stop being the customer of centralized control. Easier said than done and it is a process of small steps.
I always use a VPN and have it set to always connect me to a different server. As a result, many pages make me jump through hoops to use them. For example, coingecko almost always makes me do a captcha before allowing me in the site. But that's not the worst.
When I buy from Amazon, if I forget to turn my VPN off first, they will ask me to confirm my details and confirm my password, even if they already asked that when I logged in, and will often still insist on sending something via SMS to my phone, even though I am already using 2FA and already put my code in when I confirmed everything. A lot of the times when this happens, my bank will also lock the credit card and I have to reconfirm everything with them. Such a headache... hence I try to remember to turn off my VPN whenever I buy something online to avoid the headache.
I had this happen once even when I decided not to buy what was in my shopping cart and cancelled the order. The bank had disabled my credit card without any warning, because evidently Amazon informs them even when I just put something in my cart without buying it and they thought that was suspicious because, again, VPN. I didn't discover the card was disabled until I tried to use it at a store. That was fun.
I appreciate that both Amazon and my bank takes security seriously, but there is a point where they make it so painful that it makes me not want to use any part of the system at all.
The sooner we can get away from banks, the better. Getting away from places like Amazon would be even better, but one thing at a time, eh?
I wonder, is it to for security, or is it for control over individual users. The algorithms are made to maximize profits, and using a VPN is going to screw with their algorithms for you. So, maybe they will make it so painful to not comply, that you end up complying. It happens on a lot of other apps too. Turn off "tracking" lose access to features that have nothing to do with tracking.
This is absolutely what it is.
There's two reasons why people do anything — especially people with power to wield (like in a corporation): a good reason and the real reason.
It's worked on you, hey @dbooster? One day you might just not start the VPN up again afterwards...
You know, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that were true! As these corporations grow larger and larger, they get more and more controlling.
That is insane. Locking an account just to get their attention? What if you were in an emergency? I would have closed my account the same day. I recently had a similar situation, where my checking account was dormant, and the bank kept on bugging me to go to the branch to update my details. They even had an employee go to my house personally and want me to sign the documents and the signature card. They wasted a lot of my time but I declined it and told them I will go there when I have time. I guess I was lucky they don't lock our accounts here in the PH yet.
Too bad, I assume. What if you are overseas?
It should be illegal to lock an account like that, especially since there is no indication of some kind of abuse. I also think that it is going to get more common and happen globally....
Pretty sure it was illegal in the back in the day when each nations had public-owned banks, like here in Australia with the Commonwealth Bank. Infrastructure and nation building was it's basic remit, it was run at-cost and every citizen had a right to a private account. Pretty sure that's the basic idea but it was broken up and greedily sold off into privatisation a bit before my time.
It was a government-run enterprise. Who knows if a government could be trusted to set up a proper private citizen's bank in this day and age? Would need sufficient oversight and transparent dealings (blockchain). Not sure but I think New Zealand have done a decent job with their postal banks not too long ago.
I guess really it's up to 'us' — the owners, users and defenders of open source, decentralised software and hardware infrastructure! Looking forward to the day I can buy and sell products and necessities with HBD...
It's crazy how things have changed. They want to make sure they get all the information and at the same time, they can easily cut you off from the system at all. I remember the banks making changes to how much money you can withdraw in cash. If you want more than that, you have to schedule that in advance and they have to verify your identity too.
Sometimes even getting larger amount than usual in the account invites the ID KYC stuff. lol. I don't know how damaged the system is these days. I tend ot convert my crypto in small amount and then move. Unfortunately we can't use the crypto locally here but I suppose that will change as well. stablecoins are going to come in eventually.
art
No doubt that we could lose the control of the money in our bank account or bank card at once under this centralized economic system. They don't even quarentee that we can draw all of our money in case of bankruptcy, economic crisis, riots...
Everything we do digitally is actually not private
To me, it is public. Google sees our information and there are some set of people who will see that information
But do they use those informations for anything?
They use it for everything.
There's no point locking our accounts just because they need some sort of verification or so, except they are suspecting anything otherwise. I suggest to save ourselves the embarrassment of cards not working, it is better we should always have an alternative payment method like cash at hand or another card just in case.
A world without cash isn't worth it. Privacy is a human right.
Who was the MP? I'd be interested to know.
it's funny because a heap of people went through this recently me included. It's like the banks wanted to do a mass identification drive. Quits dangerous, they also pryed into where I was getting money from. Even questioned the amounts my wife was transferring to pay for the mortgage. I told em it was none of their business and were in a bit of a dispute atm.
So on the bright side, I've been hearing about and even witnessed in one case people telling banks where to shove it when they think they're being overreaching.
On the dark/flip side, there's this specific number of banks and there's still a bunch of people screaming about how bad things can't possibly happen because they just can't (no other reason or explanation, "just wouldn't").
I'm simultaneously waiting for those people to flip and hoping that some of the alternate systems are able to handle them.
The whole thing reeks of racketeering, but there is nobody left to hold the government accountable when they control all the nukes!