Hi everyone,
Like many of you, I have developed severe “data-slurp fatigue.” But beyond privacy concerns, I’ve come to realize it’s a massive architectural inefficiency: we are wasting storage and risking security through the aggressively growing duplication of our home addresses and emails across millions of servers just to complete basic digital actions.
As a counterweight to this, I formulated an architectural concept called UYC: Unknow Your Customer — the structural antithesis to ubiquitous KYC.
The core premise of UYC is that systems must be built so they physically cannot hold, see, or remember unnecessary personal data. Instead of hoarding information, architecture should naturally leverage cryptography and pseudonymization in scenarios where collecting, storing, or processing personal data is entirely unnecessary.
As a solo creator, I built Factflew (https://factflew.io/) specifically to test and prove that UYC is a viable foundation for a cleaner, independent web.
I’m bringing this to Lemmy to discuss the engineering reality of this approach:
- Is a UYC architecture viable at scale, or is the industry bound by too much engineering inertia when it comes to collecting data?
- How can we shift the developer mindset away from collecting everything “just in case”?
I am eager to hear your technical critique of the UYC principle and discuss whether we can build a leaner web. Cheers!
People who have worked in financial services (as an agency on behalf of businesses) know that KYC is largely a mitigation of legal liability thing - avoiding entanglement with criminal activities, or possibly illicit acts, or trade transactions that could get the business prosecuted as illegal.
It exists in the form that it does because no business wants the publicity of “Joe Bloggs made his bomb using tractor parts from Random Company Ltd, which is now under investigation for having supplied the parts”, or because no business wants to have to explain to a government official who asks “You sold your product to a country on our Unfriendly Countries list, and you gave them a product that we have a trade ban on providing - why did you break the law?”. Those are at least parts of it.
The stereotypical example often used in financial training videos takes the form of an alleged clothing shop that is secretly a meth lab - where the financial representatives get held liable for not having done sufficient background checks.
While UYK sounds like a good idea, the Powers That Be aren’t exactly going to be on-board with it for the reasons mentioned. Some KYC serves some utility, even if it is disproportionately to some people’s advantage and against others. I am also concerned about the elimination of all anonymising technologies - things like Monero - that threaten to make all private transactions impossible; and I’m also concerned that all of this talk of “transparency” is asymmetrical and one-way. I fear as a planet we have lost both the value of discretion for everyday people, as well as the value of transparency for elites to hold them to a higher standard.