Comment by matheusmoreira
7 hours ago
He's got a point though. Pix is a revolutionary system, but it is also a deeply centralized system, at the hands of the brazilian government no less. Pix is already 100% surveilled. With the widespread adoption of pix by the public, some nightmarish scenarios have entered the realm of possibility. I've seen law proposals to criminalize possession of physical cash.
Not defending credit card companies, just pointing out the fact that there are risks associated with pix that must be considered.
> Pix is already 100% surveilled
And Visa and MasterCard aren't surveiled? Isn't one of their selling points that they surveil every transaction and automatically block anything suspicious? And increasingly, the parameters for suspicious include anything pornographic or even 'pornographic' (see: the bullying of steam to remove explicit games).
At least with Pix, the costs get lower for the end users.
Of course they are. Theirs is a more corporate surveillance, though. I'm genuinely afraid of what the brazilian government can do with this sort of data.
Such a naive take. Like the US government espionage is not deeply embedded in even the most basic infrastructure, let alone payment gateways. They probably spend millions on huge data pipelines straight to the fucking pentagon.
> Theirs is a more corporate surveillance, though.
The thing about US' corporate suveillance system, and why the US government is so tolerant about it, is that US government branches either buy or are given all the data they need.
You don't get government surveillance or corporate surveillance, you get government surveillance or government and corporate surveillance.
Third party doctrine means corporate surveillance is state surveillance. And unlike Pix covering just Brazil, CC companies cover the whole world.
> > Pix is already 100% surveilled
> And Visa and MasterCard aren't surveiled?
Who is doing the surveilling is the difference. In the latter, the surveillance is done by the private sector, in aims of better targeted advertising.
In the former, it's done by either the government or by a government-tied organization, and thus invites a left-hand-passes-to-right-hand scenario, wherein the data & metadata obtained from the system could be passed to law enforcement for prosecution (doubly so if the transactions could be bundled as evidence).
> Isn't one of their selling points that they surveil every transaction and automatically block anything suspicious? And increasingly, the parameters for suspicious include anything pornographic or even 'pornographic' (see: the bullying of steam to remove explicit games).
The censorship pressures made onto Visa & Mastercard was done not by the government, but by PACs & non-governmental organizations. It is through the use of "think of the children" that they push them into censoring transactions, under the implicit threat that lawsuits will be filed if such transactions remain allowed.
The censorship is a massive issue though as it effectively means that private companies can overrule the law if they effectively monopolize critical infrastructure. Private companies are even less accountable to individuals than governments are when there is no real market choice.
The government already have card transaction access though. If you are in the banking system - you are being tracked. Doesn't matter if is Pix or a card.
Doesn't mean they will automatically expose you, as it requires justice approval technically...
Visa/Mastercard are also 100% surveilled. The nightmare of your transactions being monitored and arbitrarily blocked that's peddled as an argument against CBDCs or public financial infrastructure like Pix is already a reality for all of traditional finance (with the exception of physical cash, which happens to also be a central bank product). Sometimes even balances get confiscated, read the horror stories by Stripe customers. Americans seem to believe that the same thing is necessarily worse if it's done in the public sector. Other countries tend to see it differently. Just let them be.
> Pix is already 100% surveilled
Visa and Mastercard are 300% surveilled: once by the Brazilian government, once by the payment providers themselves, and then finally by the American government.
There are privacy implications of cashless societies, but these foreign companies are worse in every aspect.
Not really.
All financial institutions are surveilled and regulated. There's a reason Patio 11 describe the industry as an "arm of the government".
But furthermore, his argument is not about surveillance (which he accepts when he describes the central bank as the regulator) but about the competition.
It's the very idea of something being provided as a public good that is considered "anormal" and "anti-competitive" here.