Thanks for contributing some actual expertise!

What are the provisions for privacy - preventing my every financial transaction, and thus everything I do involving money, from being centrally tracked, and shared with private institutions?

And what about for preventing government from cutting people off from the financial system (without a court order)? Edit: The US government already commonly does it with non-citizens in the context of other financial systems.

At least, how does that work with FedNow if not Canada's RTR?

EDIT: (clarified and reorganized)

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glitchc 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Disclaimer: IANAL

Access to your personal information is governed by PIPEDA for private entities and the Privacy Act for government entities. Additionally each province has its own version of the Privacy Act. Since most of the big banks are headquartered in Toronto, the Ontario's Privacy Act (FIPPA) may also have some jurisdiction but not clear.

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toomuchtodo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is a function of the legal framework and government regulations of each country an instant payment system operates in. I don't have those specifics per country.

The government can cut you off as easily as Binance asking other platforms to block transactions when called upon, for example. If you don't want to be blocked, use cash or other bearer instruments. Every other traditional finance or crypto ecosystem has a throat to choke. Show me the financial services consumer persona and use cases and I'll walk through the attack path to cut their access to the financial system, as someone who has contributed to building financial infrastructure both in traditional finance, capital markets, and crypto rails for traditional folks.

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mmooss 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks.

> That is a function of the legal framework and government regulations of each country

I want to add that it can also be built in on a technical level. Some cryptocurrency already does it (I'm not advocating unregulated monetary systems or blockchain technology, I'm just saying it's possible and already done). For example, transactions could be anonymized, with PKI-type keys available only with a court order.

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toomuchtodo 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It can be built, it won't be built. There is no material demand or incentive to require building it. Crypto primitives, in this context, are just ceremony on top of legal systems. "You are trying to solve a people and politics problem with technology."

https://xkcd.com/538/

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mmooss 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sadly, I could imagine it won't be built, or not soon, but things do change; people make change.

I think govermnment and tech leaders greatly underestimate demand for privacy (confidentiality). People in polls consistently say they are worried about government and corporate surveillance and want privacy; you can see the response to Flock cameras right now. Apple, the most successful computer company, clearly sees demand for it, devotes extensive engineering to it, and markets products on that basis. People in other places (e.g., the EU) have passed laws with much greater privacy protection.

The public doesn't understand what's happening - how they are tracked (e.g., all electronic monetary transactions) and what the power/impact of that surveillance is - and they are givin no path forward but to submit. When they have a path (again, Flock, Apple, other countries), they take it. They need tech people to take the lead, educate people in plain English (not 'PKI', etc.), and develop options technical and political - politicians generally are non-technical too.

The solutions require both legal and technical components. With no technical limitation - if data is open on the laptops of everyone in the legal / finance / national security communities - the legal constraints won't work; people will use the data anyway. If there is no legal restriction, they'll obtain access anyway.

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adamdecaf 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> “Canada is the first G7 country to deploy a real-time payment system with mandatory centralized fraud services for use at launch.”

Looks like everything will pass through a single clear text layer managed by the Canadian Government.