Comment by RickS
8 days ago
I've worked on some of this stuff. It was mandated by Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) regulation on the finance industry, who developed smoother UX patterns and white-label vendors for doing such a thing, which helped normalize and simplify the process for other data-greedy sectors to adopt. Yes, marketing tried to pretty-please their way into data that should only have been for verification. To my knowledge they didn't succeed. On that attempt. At that company.
That most financial regulations targeting bad actors end up constraining or disempowering regular people is a feature, not a bug. This is a really good thread: There is no freedom without the freedom to transact.
Sort of reminds me of hollywood. They used their power to push music/movie drm. This then was pushed into the computer industry (to play media), and then phones and tables became locked up/normalized (to play media), and then the locks have made all this other (disempowering regular people) stuff possible.