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.
Nothing naive about it. Brazil is not the USA. It hasn't exactly demonstrated an ability to "deeply embed" itself into internet backbones the way the USA does. The problem with Pix is: they don't need to.
Lack of capabilities limit the scope of government tyranny. It used to be that the government didn't have the manpower required to audit everyone and everything, so only the bank transactions above some threshold would be monitored. With pix, they are monitoring 100% of transactions now. This is a massive gain in capability that should not be ignored.
>With pix, they are monitoring 100% of transactions now.
First, I don't think they are.
Second, good - they should have an _algorithm_ checking every transaction. MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me; the government could catch all the money laundering that is the lifeblood of crime, or maybe just finally eradicate tax evasion, the necessary first step towards rationalizing our tax code and one of the core issues of our country?
Your opinions read like you have misplaced worries, if not values.
100% of pix transactions are unconditionally sent to government bodies for monitoring. It's not an algorithmic "only if it matches some criteria" affair.
What they're actually doing with the data is anyone's guess. They could be doing anything. The tax department is no doubt going to be the first part of the brazilian government to adopt AI. Who knows what other creative uses they're going to find for it?
> MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me
And we should be making it illegal for them to do that, not compounding the problem by piling on equivalent government functionality on top of it. The problem is supposed to be fixed, not replaced with a national version.
> the government could catch all the money laundering that is the lifeblood of crime
The optimal amount of money laundering, fraud, crime, are all non-zero. You can "catch all the money laundering" quite easily, just install a totalitarian state panopticon where everybody is guilty by default and constantly surveilled by an omniscient intelligence apparatus, problem solved.
You're going to need to accept some amount of crime if you want to have some semblance of freedom and basic human dignity.
> Second, good - they should have an _algorithm_ checking every transaction. MasterCard and VISA do it and do nothing for me;
You are confusing transaction authorization done by card networks/issuers with the kind of fraud analysis that happens post settlement and requires correlating multiple transactions and accounts
> the government could catch all the money laundering
No, you don’t have enough information in transactions alone to identify all money laundering, specially the sophisticated kind.
>It hasn't exactly demonstrated an ability to "deeply embed" itself into internet backbones the way the USA does
I’m not sure how that’s even relevant to the point I was trying to make which is: you are monitored by a foreign and openly hostile government through its privately owned collaborators. That’s worse than your own government using transactional data to monitor money laundering and tax evasion activities that detracts from your direct quality of life. And again, it’s naive to think Brasil has no control over the internet backbone in its own territory, you must not understand how it even works to say something like that.
> Lack of capabilities limit the scope of government tyranny. It used to be that the government didn't have the manpower required to audit everyone and everything, so only the bank transactions above some threshold would be monitored. With pix, they are monitoring 100% of transactions now. This is a massive gain in capability that should not be ignored.
And yet here you are arguing against something that decreases the amount of potential bad actors who can gain direct access to your data. It’s the digital age for a while now, there is a general privacy tradeoff in anything you do online. If that’s a concern, use money. My issue with you is that, again, you seem to prefer to hand over your data to foreigners that have no incentive to use it for anything other than extracting as much value as possible out of your country AND with the additional criminally flagrant behavior of inflicting their interests on judicial and political decisions AND make your pay a 3 fucking percent charge over it.
A sizable amount of Americans are completely hoodwinked by capitalists that have made their material lives worse in every capacity. Thinking that an accountable entity, a democratic government, as a worse than the unaccountable centrally planned dictatorship (a corporation) is just laughable but America has been a laughable place for quite a while as we prefer helping corporations over literal people.
