Comment by refulgentis
1 year ago
KYC stands for Know Your Customer, and is a core regulation in banking. So we can pivot off that and work through what a bank does to verify your identity.
I signed up for a Mercury bank account a few months back for my Delaware corporation without talking to anyone, so I'll use that as a template.
I can't remember the exact steps, but tl;dr submit a passport photo / driver's license photo and a photo I take in the app itself. If it was a not-US passport, then they'd dig into a full verification, not just a quick manual check of "is that face the same as the passport/license, is the passport/license ID # valid, and are the photos edited"
You seem to be conceding the point that they would be forced to invade the privacy of their US customers in addition to just foreign ones.
True, I guess I wouldn't call it invading privacy, that's sounds a bit overwrought to me. Then banks invade my privacy, the DMV invades my privacy, etc. There's always tradeoffs, I respect people's concern about them, and I wish there was a gentler to say it.
> Then banks invade my privacy, the DMV invades my privacy, etc.
That is a reasonable and factually accurate statement.
> There's always tradeoffs, I respect people's concern about them, and I wish there was a gentler to say it.
The tradeoff here is astonishingly bad. Studies have shown that AML/KYC have an effectiveness of less than a fraction of one percent. They continue to proliferate because their largest costs fall on the users rather than the companies, so they're the thing that large corporations suggest as a "solution" when they're being pressured to do something. Because people have the perception that it will do some good, even though that perception is inaccurate.
In reality what they do is provide a means to satisfy "something must be done" in a way that dumps the costs on marginalized users instead of politicians and corporations.
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> a photo I take in the app itself
So what else did they pull off your phone? Location data, personal photos, personal files, wifi connections near by, microphone data, ongoing location data?
Exactly, they just want more mass surveillance.
None of those, just asked for the photo
You said it was their app correctly?
Have you validated that they didn't take the other bits off your phone?
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