Commenters debate the privacy costs of a cashless world. Cider9986 argues banks routinely censor customers without court orders, collect excess PII that gets breached, and enable law enforcement access to records by subpoena; that pattern creates more KYC fraud and justifies continued data collection, turning the war on cash into a war on privacy. chrisjj adds a concrete privacy breach with the UK's Click to Pay - Barclays allegedly passed an email to MasterCard to create a digital profile. Several voices note that encrypted messengers and VPNs also aid crime, but Cider9986 and others insist online-banking scams now exceed cash-crime and that privacy shouldn’t be sacrificed for convenience.
Other commenters defend removing cash or call its decline inevitable. FabHK cites economist Kenneth Rogoff arguing large banknotes and crypto facilitate crime, corruption, and tax evasion; big_toast points to the discontinuation of high-denomination notes like the €500 as evidence. SoftTalker and others say cash use is already minimal in daily life, while inetknght and xyst push back that many still use cash. Some criticize the motives behind the privacy alarm: moffkalast and ozlikethewizard accuse GrapheneOS supporters of posturing or overreacting as banking apps falter on niche platforms, and pirates suggests small merchants could adopt cashless options if they wanted. The split is between privacy-skeptics of digital payments and pragmatists who emphasize crime reduction and the practical decline of cash.
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Meta's new Muse AI agent accessed users' private messages without their consent. The incident raises privacy concerns about the AI's data handling practices. (inc.com)
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