cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/48532948
Banks are on an unstoppable uncontrolled trajectory in pursuit of KYC over-achievement. That is, they over-collect far more data on people than legally required (before it gets leaked to criminals in data breaches). Banks’ privacy policies are rife with anti-consumer weasel words.
It’s such a shit-show that privacy proponents have no real choice other than to quit banks and operate entirely with cash. Not many people have that level of discipline.
Software can turn this situation around. For example, there are ~6000 privacy-abusing banks and credit unions in the US. If a robot harvests all the privacy policies, fetches AOS apps to check permission reqs, records those with websites MitMd by Cloudflare, and uses all that info to find the lesser of evils, consumers can participate in creating a competition for privacy (as opposed to a competition of meaningless soul-selling fractions of a percent of interest earnings). The heart of the problem is banks are only getting pressure from the side of oppressors and tyranny and no pressure from the side of the people they purport to serve. Software and data can remedy this.
Worth noting that long before the AI bubble started, a university in the US studied bank privacy policies in bulk using a scraper bot that just looked at the standardised privacy disclosure forms for which all banks must conform to a standard layout. The data has rotted by now so their research is not of much use.
I’m definately in the corpo AI hating group myself because it really looks bleak for LLMs controlled by NGOs and tiny operations. It looks like we must choose between licking the boots of a tech giant to get chatgpt-like service, or be excluded.
There are exceptions though for some services. I run argos-translate to do offline language translations using FOSS. It’s entirely free world stuff. I wonder if the answer is to promote argos-translate while spotlighting that it’s an LLM that you can self-host.