👁️ Privacy and Financial Surveillance

How banking surveillance, programmable currencies, and the war on code are building the new reality

Sunday Sun Thoughts. George Orwell imagined surveillance as a telescreen on the wall. He was only wrong about the format. Today, surveillance makes no noise, does not intimidate with screams, does not need soldiers. It vibrates in your pocket. It approves or denies a transaction. It silently observes every penny spent, every choice, every behavior. The new prison is not made of bars, but of code.

Money has always been more than currency. It is freedom in its purest state. Physical money does not ask for permission, leaves no trace, and requires no registration. But this form of freedom is being rapidly replaced by something very different: central bank-controlled digital currencies. The rhetoric is efficiency, innovation, inclusion. The real effect is absolute surveillance.

Programmable currencies not only record what you do, they can decide what you can do. They can have an expiration date, restrict where you spend, prevent certain purchases, and apply automatic punishments. Money ceases to be neutral and becomes an instrument of social engineering. A system where correct behavior is rewarded and deviation is punished with blockage, financial silence, and exclusion.

In Brazil, this process advances naturally. While the Constitution speaks of privacy and the LGPD promises data protection, the financial system demands biometrics, facial recognition, total tracking, and continuous monitoring. Privacy ends at the bank’s app. And now, with state digital currencies, it may end entirely. Can it be different in the face of the explosion of scams, digital fraud, and deepfakes? Probably not. The problem is that most people still don’t have a real sense of the magnitude of the risks involved.

You change an email address when you no longer want spam. You delete an Instagram account. But a biometric data will be yours forever, even after your death. Once leaked, there is no reset.

The most interesting thing is that this surveillance does not only come from the State. Private banks are already behaving like financial and even ideological police. Accounts are closed due to “reputational risk.” Opinions are becoming a banking criterion. You don’t need to commit a crime. You just need to be on the wrong side of the narrative, and look, I’m not saying there is a right or wrong side. That depends on the interest of the financial big brother on duty.

The internal environment of some banks reveals the laboratory of this future. Employees monitored by software that measures mouse movement, screen time, pauses, and silence. Everything becomes a metric, everything becomes suspicion, everything becomes data.

Once, a businessman had all his accounts blocked in a single day after a bank identified a movement considered “atypical.” He was not under investigation, there was no court order, there was no formal crime. The trigger was a deepfake scam involving his own image in an attempted fraud he was not even aware of. The system cross-referenced data, flagged risk, triggered alerts, and within hours, he was financially paralyzed. He couldn’t pay suppliers, fill up his car, buy food, or even transfer money to his own family. It took days to prove he was a victim, not the perpetrator. The algorithm erred, but he was the one left without access to his own money… but then I ask, technically speaking, did the system err?

While the end of remote work is being discussed, a loophole for an almost military monitoring of work is also opened. I myself do not think remote work fully works for everyone. First, because it is still a privilege for a few, compared to the vast majority of the population. Second, because, unfortunately, some people use the freedom of remote work for everything but working. This ends up staining a modality that could work very well.

The remote work experience during the pandemic also created a dangerous habit from an information security perspective. Fragile domestic networks, insecure personal computers, sharing of environments and passwords. Although remote work is viable for some functions, where real trust exists between the parties, it significantly expands the attack surface.

And it is precisely at this point that this article arrives: trust. Privacy without trust does not exist. As a famous former president would say: it’s a lie, a pantomime, a romp, a daydream, a summer night’s dream. Privacy only works in environments where there is trust between the parties. Without it, any failure becomes a systemic risk.

Meanwhile, the few technologies that still guarantee real privacy continue to be attacked. Code becomes crime. Encryption becomes a threat. Neutral tools are treated as weapons. The crime is not fought. The refuge is eliminated.

All this continues to be justified by one word: security. But recent history shows that the more centralized financial data is, the larger the leaks, the deeper the flaws, and the more fragile the structures become. There is no inviolable vault when it stores the entire lives of millions of people.

We are entering a world where freedom will not be taken by force, but traded for convenience.