U.S. Regulators are Rolling Back Privacy

by Marvin Dumont

If you’re like most people, then you enjoy privacy. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t share your sentiments, and wants to further encroach on your personal space.

Who cares whether or not it’s moral or ethical? Throw those ethos away.

With cryptos, authorities want to know at all times who’s doing business with who; why they’re transacting; and for how much — regardless of the fact that such searches are applied to everyone without a court warrant or suspicion of crime.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an inter-governmental body, is proposing new international governing standards that would require crypto exchanges, wallet providers, and related entities “to collect and share information about where and to whom they are sending money,” per CoinDesk report.

Countries that don’t wish to participate are coerced into doing so by threat of being blacklisted in the global financial system.

Decentralization is looking less decentralized with each passing regulation.

Per CoinDesk:

This would go beyond the basic “know your customer” (KYC) rules that bedevil many crypto users. In addition to verifying and keeping records of their own users’ identities, exchanges and other service providers would have to pass customer information to each other when transferring funds, just as banks are required to do. This is known in the U.S. as the “travel rule”.

Apollo Foundation aims to protect users privacy and anonymity via IP masking, coin mixing, private ledger, decentralized exchange, and encrypted messaging. Privacy shouldn’t be taken for granted, and for Americans, it’s supposed to be protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Just because it’s a connected world doesn’t mean governments should trample on individual liberties.

What we’re now seeing is central banks and governments looking to 24/7 monitor and control the global flow of cryptocurrencies — like they do with sovereign fiat cash that they print and devalue.

The proposed FATF standards, which is expected to be passed in the coming weeks, will require organizations to acquire information on originating source of funds. That requirement threatens users who are skeptical of third parties holding sensitive info that can be accessed by hackers, unethical entities, and other dangerous people.

FATF’s members include 36 economies and two regional bodies — making it extremely influential in how the banking system works.

Julia Morse, political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara said:

When countries with large financial systems like the United States and the U.K. implement FATF standards, they change how international banks and financial firms do business globally. This creates downstream effects for countries that are not FATF members.

Apollo (APL) all-in-one privacy currency combines features of mainstream cryptocurrencies in a truly private and unregulatable platform. With two-second block speed, APL is one of the fastest cryptos on Earth. The privacy platform lets “Apollonauts” transact and send data anonymously via Encrypted Messaging, Private Ledger, Decentralized Exchange, IP Masking 2.0 and Coin Mixing. Learn more at www.apollocurrency.com