In an article on Medium, David Marcus, head of Facebook’s Financial Division, talks about how his company’s proposed stablecoin solution, consisting of the Libra project (now renamed as Diem) and the Novi digital wallet, could help millions of people around the world to make payments without having to resort to slow and expensive traditional systems, especially people who do not have bank accounts.
At the same time, he talks about how his company deserves “a fair chance” in the financial and cryptocurrency payments environment, clearly playing “the poor little company” that is prevented by evil regulators from offering solutions to the underprivileged and needy.
The idea, clearly, is to promote the use of DIem and Novi as a way for users to move money across borders quickly and cheaply, in many cases even for free. But the very heavy regulatory scrutiny the company was subject to when it tried to launch Libra forced those plans to be temporarily shelved, a setback that Marcus now describes virtually as persecution in the form of antitrust investigations around the world: in short, Facebook faces unfair resistance from the financial industry.
The reality is that, whatever Marcus says, opposition to Facebook’s plans was justified because of its monopolistic nature, because it knows everything about all its users across its vast empire, and because introducing a payment system would also allow the company to access with pinpoint accuracy details about its users’ finances. The guarantees of confidentiality that the company offers in this case are worthless, as the company itself has shown again and again over time: we all know perfectly well that Facebook’s only interest is knowing even more about its users and then reselling that information to its advertisers. The finishing touch to a megalomaniacal strategy of world domination, consolidating a position of omnipotent observer of everything we do.
Does Facebook have the ability to build a good payment tool, much faster than current ones, offering a solution to the world’s unbanked population, and that looks a lot like how payments should ideally work? Possibly. Should it be allowed to offer it? Absolutely not. Never. Under no circumstances. Because helping that unbanked population is a screen, a way of justify a tool that in reality will be used to mine Facebook users’ finances for vital information.
If Facebook wants to help the unbanked population of the world, it should offer them tools that do not force them to sacrifice their privacy. From the moment you set up your convenient e-wallet and start using it, you will have given the company total visibility over your interests and what you do with your money, along the lines of what happened with WeChat in China. Facebook should never have any responsibility for people’s financial data, because it has shown itself to be untrustworthy time and again. No, Facebook is not a poor, persecuted and harassed company, far from it: it is an organization that should never be allowed by any regulator to have access to people’s financial information. Under no circumstances.
Let’s hope the regulators concerned continue to be clear about this.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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