Well that didn’t take long. My article warning about the emergence of nannying controls on private money (any money that is not cash) is less than two weeks old, but the Telegraph is already reporting that NatWest has turned on a feature in its app that nags you about your CO2 emissions. Santander is all-in on this too, awarding the company behind these cyber bullies, CoGo, winner of its X Environment Challenge, Be Sustainable category. TSB gave it a whirl too but according to the Telegraph ditched it over the summer.
Not that any reader of the Daily Sceptic should care, but it doesn’t even calculate your CO2 emissions from your purchases, because it cannot. As I have pointed out previously, payment systems do not know what you have purchased, only whom you are purchasing from. That applies both to private money and to public money. So, apps like these fall back to making a guess based on the merchant, or just the merchant category. As the Telegraph article says: “The estimated footprint of purchases is calculated from the overall value of a transaction, as opposed to the individual contents of a shop.”
For these banks, facts and accuracy are just collateral damage in their ideological war.
Other than righteous indignance, what are we to make of this? Although these apps are touted as opt-in, the data they hold are not. From the Farage debanking scandal we know the likes of NatWest Group are not averse to using whatever data they can get their hands on to build a case against an enemy, or ‘customer’ as they sometimes call them. The same goes for other operators in the private money space such as PayPal, as the Free Speech Union discovered to its cost last year.
But complaining about these nag-apps is missing the bigger point. The problem is that banks necessarily deal with our data but cannot be trusted with them. I know what you are thinking, we have the Information Commissioner’s Office, doughty defender of our data. You can read its utterly supine response to the Farage scandal here. It amounts to the Information Commissioner, John Edwards, writing a letter to the banks to remind them of their responsibilities to the public, that they should not be using information in a way that is “unduly unexpected”. There is no action, no bite from the watchdog. We can surmise that the banks and PayPals will continue their woke trajectory. It is going to get worse before it gets better.
Judging from the comments on my previous article, many sceptics’ solution to all this is just to revert to using cash. Okay for now, for small one-off purchases, but forget moving house or buying a car. However, it is pure fantasy to think that any organisation or company of even modest size could close its bank accounts and survive entirely on cash. It might work for your window cleaner, but it won’t work for a telco, estate agent or import-export business, to pick three at random. Nor for that matter for any organisation, commentator or creator making an income off Substack, BuyMeACoffee or social media. And why should they be marginalised? Why can we all not have the convenience and economic advantages of modern fintech but without the woke wrapper if we choose?
The question then is why the market is not serving this need? Part of the problem is that the bar to entering the banking market, getting a banking licence, is very high. The funding requirements mean that you need to look good in the eyes of other banks or venture capitalists, most of whom have by now got a nasty dose of the woke mind virus. What we need to address is this double whammy of the woke narrative and the dysfunctional state of the market. We need a positive counternarrative and the conditions to act on it. I do not think that positive narrative has to be novel, just remembering the successes of free markets and enterprise. The conditions to act on it are more controversial.
In my view, private enterprise has shown that it alone cannot fix the money system. We have Bitcoin and its ilk, but its value varies wildly, it has fundamental problems with reversibility and identity (ask any ransomware victim) and it is not on a path to joining the mainstream anything like soon enough. We need a public good, serving the public interest both as a public money and as a public infrastructure. That thing is something like a CBDC.
As I have explained previously, CBDCs are by no means easy to get right. The design choices will need the wisdom of Solomon, and then there are the legislative, engineering and political hurdles. For a deeper dive on those problems I recommend the excellent report from the Institute for Money, Technology and Inclusion at University of California at Irvine. One of the motivations to persevere, get the designs right and to solve the other problems is that it allows for a much more diverse set of participants in the market. For example, proposals for the U.K. CBDC have so-called Payment Interface Providers (PIPs) with API access to the core ledger to provide wallet services, allowing retail users (the public and businesses) to make payments. PIPs do not have to be banks. That would allow something like the Free Speech Union to offer a wallet (put that on your To Do list Toby) which facilitates individuals and businesses interacting directly, completely cutting out the banks. Banks could still offer their services, covered in green gunge if you so wish, but the rest of us could have all the benefits of modern fintech without having to take the knee. Now that’s a narrative I can get behind.
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Nobody can be trusted with our data. Least of all the state and the government.
The author may scoff at the obtuseness of DS readers, but he is even more ignorant of his own blind spot.
Governments are the biggest abusers of power. The bigger the entity, the bigger the abuse.
This man/woman just doesn’t get it.
Exactly, Stewart. Perhaps the author can be persuaded to reveal who he/she is. As far as I am concerned, it’s gaslighting.
Yep. Exactly this, government are always the biggest threat to citizens. A few examples, ww1 the mindless slaughter of young men to no purpose, convid the ventilation to death of the elderly and finally the stabbination program that randomly killed/maimed all ages groups.
The difference between big tech and goverment is what? The two are the two side of the same coin.Anyway see an example of whether to trust goverment- see Hallet inquiry.
Why so certain they don’t know what we’re buying?
There will be a transaction code and the till generates a receipt number so even if they don’t CURRENTLY know what we’re buying it’s not a big step to join the two up…
Add to this reports of when the police are trying to track people for identity theft they look at what brands/products they’re buying to try and link them it suggests some parts of the state already can/do so
Gives the lie to the NatWest bullying, doesn’t it – bet they’re not targeting existing veggie noshers. Supermarket chains can already tailor vouchers to previous purchases; similarly Ebay, Amazon and other online retailers – they’ll all try and sell you another gizmo like the one you just bought. If they hold that data, don’t tell me the bank data scrapers can’t access it if they wanted to. It’s what ‘purchase history’ is all about!
The option of non-banking PIPs to provide wallets sounds intriguing; but what’s the betting they’ll make it extremely difficult for the FSU or other motivated organisations to set one up – as with anyone wanting to start an independent bank, for example.
Ditch your Nectar and Clubcards. You’re selling your data and facilitating surveillance.
Also get rid of your bank’s app on your phone, and certainly don’t use google or apple pay either.
I wonder how many excitable Islamofascist Jihadis have already been debanked?
None and zero point zero being even vaguely considered?
Well! My flabber is absolutely ghasted!
Quite why you’re always ‘anonymous’ is not clear to me but that aside I simply don’t agree with you. If it’s programmable, digital currency using online access, it can, in theory, be taken over and abused by other less-than beneficial parties. That makes it unsafe and far from secure. Personally, I see this drip-drip of articles in support of some sort of digital currency as nothing but gaslighting. Am I to believe that the DS has also been co-opted and corrupted?
Exactly Aethelred. I am all for hearing the alternative point of view but how many more times do we have to have the case for CBDC’s in the face of resolute ‘no thank yous’ from the DS membership?
The possibility that CBDC’s will not be abused is so remote as to be on a par with a government that would act in the best interests of its people.
One reason could be that ‘anonymous’ doesn’t necessarily have to be just one person. Of course the Elephant in the room is that we all hide behind a nom de plume on DS.
My name really is Aethelred though!
“Sustainable Development”——–The lowering of living standards and therefore well being and life expectancy based on a political agenda regarding the earths resources and wealth ,all to be controlled by technocrats at the global government in waiting at the UN and WEF and to which all western politicians have signed up to. We see that with their endless preaching about a climate crisis unsupported by any science and their determination to enforce NET ZERO.
That’s everything in a nutshell.
wink
Beautifully put.
wink to you as well. ———–I have been looking into this issue since about 2007. I don’t think I know everything but I do feel I understand this issue better than ordinary people that are being fleeced. But often you find those being fleeced think that any opinion that contradicts the current narrative of a climate emergency must be some kind of conspiracy theory.
The last paragraph seems plausible , maybe something like that will materialise
Has Anonymous IT Reporter ever explained why, in his opinion, governments are so keen on CBDCs?
I make many of my purchases using a credit card which I pay off automatically in full each month. Best of luck to my bank in assigning a carbon footprint to these purchases from home and abroad.
“The design choices will need the wisdom of Solomon”.
Considering that these deign choices will have gone through multiple iterations and passed through the hands of multiple technical and management committees, wisdom of any sort will have been lost at an early stage.
Boom. Nail on head, but, no, CBDCs are not the solution. The solution is rebalancing society, which means razing the current political system to the ground, and introducing legislation that makes it unlawful to restrict how people use their own money. The solution is not to provide even more potential for the state to engage in totalitarian control. To have lived through the last few years and come to the conclusion that CBDCs are the answer is absolutely perverse.
Like others, I think we must know the authors identity. Tony, please step forward.
How do you introduce legislation after razing the current political system to the ground?
Related to Net Zero in the name of saving the planet. Goes to show just how far removed from concerns about the flora & fauna of the natural world the net zero zealots are.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/killing-koalas-to-save-wind-farms/
To make the case against CBDCs, watch this:-
https://twitter.com/Alphafox78/status/1703924055508656404
Here we go again.
As we saw during the Covid Lunacy, the Government and the B of E are the chief protagonists of control, surveillance, propaganda and currency destruction (inflation).
Climate Change propaganda and coercion comes direct from the Nudge Unit.
A CBDC isn’t the way to fight propaganda, coercion, surveillance and cancel culture: it’s the way they intend to make it unstoppable and impossible to oppose.
Hmm, the private sector’s making a really bad hash of it. Let’s hand it to the Government to do. When has that ever worked?
Natwest started calculating your “Footprint” LAST YEAR. it’s Orwellian. you can turn it off but it continues to monitor in the background. it makes suggestions like “Buy used clothing” etc. It must have been in the small prints somewhere & they just launched it. I have moved a huge chunk of money out of my natwest account as these bankers are NOT on our side.