Reclaiming Opacity: The Imperative for Privacy in Crypto

Crypto must reclaim privacy and opacity, because transparency has become a self-imposed form of surveillance that the text calls an auto-panopticon. Bitcoin made financial activity permanently traceable, turning crypto's promise of liberation into a record of behavior and affiliations. Shoshana Zuboff calls this surveillance capitalism, the mass harvesting and commodification of personal data. Cambridge Analytica, a British firm active from 2013 to 2018, harvested Facebook user data for political profiling and was involved in the 2016 UK EU membership referendum.