By IMF Report Reveals CBDCs Will Allow Police to Collect, Store Personal Data Creating a Surveillance State
by Jacob M. Thompson | Winepress News
“CBDC data allows for commercial exploitation while also raising the possibility of state surveillance,” the IMF said.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has disclosed in a new report discussing the safety risks surrounding central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and fears people have about them. In it’s report, the IMF concedes that a central bank could collect a plethora of private data and could even overturn this information to authorities, acknowledging some of the animosity those critical of CBDCs have had about them.
Published on August 30th, the IMF’s paper – “Central Bank Digital Currency Data Use and Privacy Protection” – “offers a framework to help countries navigate, as well as tools to help them manage, the trade-offs between CBDC data use and privacy protection,” the IMF says.
The IMF begins its report immediately explaining how retail CBDCs contain all sorts of information when a transaction occurs, and therefore can be leveraged by central banks and other entities for themselves, and could be overturned to government authorities and police for potential crimes depending on national policies. The IMF wrote:
Central bank digital currency (CBDC), as a digital form of central bank money, may allow for a “digital trail”—data—to be collected and stored. In contrast to cash, CBDC could be designed to potentially include a wealth of personal data, encapsulating transaction histories, user demographics, and behavioral patterns. Personal data could establish a link between counterparty identities and transactions.
Like other payments data, CBDC data may have economic value. Data are non-rival. Data are infrastructural resources that can be used by an unlimited number of users and for an unlimited number of purposes as an input to produce goods and services. CBDC data could potentially be harvested by financial institutions that, in turn, could help develop data-driven businesses.
The authors later defined exactly what data collected is. This includes the payer’s/payee’s identity, payer’s/payee’s pseudonymous identifiers (account number or token address that belongs to, or is controlled by, a counterparty), transaction data, and other and payer and payee transaction metadata (merchant’s name, purchase location, and spending category). Read Full Article >
