The head of the Bank of England’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) project says their CBDC system will not share its users’ personal data with the government.
In a new podcast interview, Tom Mutton tells reporter Emily Nicolle about the Bank of England’s plans for CBDCs.
Mutton says all forms of electronic payments currently in use, CBDC or not, have some sort of transparency and are not 100% private or anonymous.
“First of all, the anonymity of cash is not something anyone chose. It’s just a function of the size of cash. And cash will be available as long as people want to use it. But I don’t think cash is the right equation.
I think a better comparison is… 90%+ of the money we use today is electronic. All electronic money creates a data footprint. And it really is a choice of: who do you want that data from and how do you want them to protect it?”
Mutton says the Bank of England is proposing that under the proposed CBDC system, the central bank will see the history of each transaction, but not the person behind it.
“The really crucial thing is that no data is shared with The Bank of England – no personal data is shared with The Bank of England or the government. We will know what transactions happened, but we have no idea who made them. The private wallet you use knows who the person is, but not what the transactions were.
And that is a very big difference, because at the moment financial institutions know both sides of it: the individual and the transaction history. Under our system, we suggest that we know the transaction history but not the individual, and the wallet knows the individual and not the transaction history. That gives people the assurance that The Bank of England does not collect personal data from people.”
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Featured image: Shutterstock/prodigital art/Natalia Siiatovskaia