The head of the Bank of England’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) project says their CBDC system won’t 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 that all forms of electronic payments currently being used, 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 that somebody chose to do. It’s just a function of the format of cash. And cash will be available as long as people want to use it. But I don’t think cash is the right comparison.
I think a better comparison is… 90%+ of the money we use today is electronic. All electronic money creates a data footprint. And it’s really a choice of – who do you want to have that data and how do you want them to protect it?”
Mutton says that 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 actual individual behind them.
“The really crucial thing is that there will be no data shared with The Bank of England – no personal data shared with The Bank of England or the government. We’ll know what transactions happened but we’ll have no idea who did them. The private wallet you use will know who the person is but they won’t know what the transactions were.
And that’s a really big difference because, at the moment, financial institutions know both sides of that – the individual and the transaction history. Under our system, we’re proposing we know the transaction history but not the individual, and the wallet will know the individual and not the transaction history. That will give people the assurance that The Bank of England is not collecting people’s personal data.”
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Featured Image: Shutterstock/prodigital art/Natalia Siiatovskaia
