Privacy has become a dirty word, but it remains something profoundly normal.
Fraud is real and so are the risks created by linking identity, transaction history and bitcoin ownership.
Privacy is the reasonable expectation that your personal life, your movements and your finances are not automatically open for inspection.
FATF’s new fraud roadmap calls for more data to be collected on more people and shared across more agencies.
We already know where this can lead:
- exchange breaches
- doxxed customers
- wealth linked to home addresses
- physical attacks
All involving people whose details were sitting in compliance databases.
You cannot leak what was never collected. Bigger databases do not stop criminals and more data does not equal greater safety. They create larger honeypots, with ordinary users often becoming the easiest targets.
Data collection is now set to expand under the UK’s FATF Presidency. I wrote about where this roadmap could lead for Forbes.
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The FATF's ambition is a predictably linear projection – assuming human behavior adheres to predictable patterns of misdirection. That assumption’s inherent fragility, given the decentralized nature of Bitcoin transactions, suggests a fundamentally flawed roadmap.

