Kathy Gibson is at SingularityU Exponential Finance Summit in Cape Town – There’s a fear that exponential technology and exponential data is going to be adverse for personal privacy.
This is not strictly true, according to Shane Glynn, co-founder and general counsel at Mobilecoin, who points out that data can not only be used in negative ways, but in ways that benefit people too.
“Good or bad, this is the world we live in,” he adds.
Traditionally, cash has always conveyed a certain amount of privacy, Glynn says.
This started to change with the advent of computing and its role in data collection to enable easy, non-cash payment options.
With the Web came the need to make remote payments, and now phones have replaced cash as the payment mechanism for many services.
The addition of things like location data and more has now seen the complete de-anonymisation of data.
App-based or QR-code payments are now common in markets like China and are expanding rapidly outside of that market too, Glynn says.
These systems are very convenient, but they aren’t very private, he adds. The companies offering the services now collect vast quantities of data that they wouldn’t have access to before.
Even companies like Uber collect quantities of data, which is a big change with the way people traditionally interacted with the world.
“This data exists and is having strange, unexpected consequences,” Glynn says.
The situation today is complex, and Glynn classifies payment systems according to privacy versus performance.
The fast systems include systems like AliPay, WeChat, Visa, PayPal and others. A bit more privacy is available on fast systems like bitcoin and Lightning Network.
Offering better privacy but poor performance are other cryptocurrency products like Monero, Grin, Dash and others.
As yet, there are still no players that marry perfect privacy with great performance, Glynn says.
He believes there are two paths forward: regulation and technology.
In Europe, GDPR safeguards customers’ privacy and he thinks other countries may consider similar regulations.
Some technology providers are taking privacy into their own hands and engineering it into their payment systems. However, these systems need to become faster and easier to use before they will be properly effective, Glynn says.