Ideally we would have a world where privacy is the default and everyone has it. Because we don’t, and there is considerable friction required to have financial

Ideally we would have a world where privacy is the default and everyone has it. Because we don’t, and there is considerable friction required to have financial privacy, most people don’t bother unless they really need it or are unusually privacy conscious. Really needing it may often mean they are doing something nefarious. That doesn’t mean the technology to enable privacy is “bad”, it means it’s too hard to use and that as a society we have done poorly at guaranteeing people’s right to privacy. Not so long ago you might have ben able to say the same thing about people communicating with end-to-end encryption, but thanks to a concerted effort to improve the UX of this tech. and it’s adoption by some very widely used services, it’s now commonplace. End to end encryption could no longer be argued to be mostly used by criminals. Hopefully we will get there with financial privacy too. NB: in neither case am I suggesting that the government should be unable to require you to provide information in some situations (or face the consequences of withholding it against, say, a court order), only that dragnet surveillance of everyone by default is never acceptable.