Yes, and it gives us a view into the headspace of the people in the finance industry. It’s true, these researchers don’t have direct power, but they do have inf

Yes, and it gives us a view into the headspace of the people in the finance industry. It’s true, these researchers don’t have direct power, but they do have influence. And that can be dangerous too. This quote from the article is very illustrative: > institutional banking system is facing a serious threat from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. The researchers identify two key areas in which this is true: Tech companies have greater access to soft-information, and messaging platforms can take the place of the physical locations that banks rely on for meeting with customers This tells me that there are people in the finance industry that think that they are the underdog. They just want the same access to information big tech companies already have so that they could cut the little guy a better deal. If only governments and regulators could see that. Wouldn’t we live in a better world? They don’t think that this could usher in a financial version of 1984 because they’re optimistic in the same way that Mark Zuckerberg was optimistic that making a social networking site to connect people together would be utopian. These researchers are going to impart this idea on students and their colleagues, eventually someone is going to go into government with complete faith that giving financial institutions very fine grained information on citizens is in everyone’s best interests. That is what is dangerous about this.