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.
The thing with that is, it won’t be implemented in a capitalist system where companies will collect most of the data they can so they can sell it to ad companies, business partners and government intelligence who are all willing to pay big bucks for it.
The reason it doesn’t happen is not that there was no engineering architecture design to prevent it, but because no company is going to willingly break the iron law of “profits above all else” that capitalism requires.
The antithesis to all this is free open source alternatives, like Lemmy itself for instance, that don’t collect more data than they need for the simple reason that they are not built with the goal of profit in mind.
So if we want a better web experience in the near future, the best thing you can do is convince people to use FOSS alternatives and create communities here instead of the giants like Reddit, Instagram etc.
KYC is not just for funsies, they are legal requirements for a lot of businesses. If they don’t legally have to store information, they can just choose not to. It doesnt require a framework, Lemmy manages just fine without storing personal data.
The problem is that even when businesses aren’t legally required to store this data, they continue to hoard it anyway.There is a huge difference between KYC for a financial system and data hoarding by a merchant. I completely agree that KYC is a legal necessity for payment systems. When you buy something, your bank already knows who you are, and the payment gateway (like Stripe) verifies the transaction to prevent fraud.But my main question is: Why does the merchant itself need to pull and store your email, phone number, billing address, or even your name in their local database?The payment provider handles the regulatory compliance, but the merchant doesn’t need to know my identity to sell me a product or service. This is exactly where UYC (Unknow Your Customer) comes in. We need an architecture where the merchant only receives a “Success” token from Stripe, leaving the merchant completely blind to the user’s private data. This prevents every random website we visit from becoming a potential point of data leak.
If the merchant is hoarding the data, they want to do it. If they want to do it, why would they use your framework?
Also, merchants need your name and address to ship the product to you…
Also, merchants need your name and address to ship the product to you…
Well all they would really need is a one time code that you provide them that you’ve pre registered your address with the shipping carrier.
Would 100% prefer a shipping carrier who supported “oh address is 17bkHdb74nKl? Send it to 123 main st, city, state, etc”
100% agreed on the first part though. Perhaps if the shipping carriers all worked together (ha!) on a common system like this they could do it.
I’ve had the same though re. shipping addresses, but I don’t think it scales well. You’d need every postie to have an online device that allows them to link QR code/uuid code to the real address, and delivery just gets a lot harder.
In Australia, AusPost allows you to generate a “virtual” PO box, which is a lot easier to deal with, but you have to go to the post office to pickup.
Or maybe just a machine at the shipping carrier or post office that slaps a label on the package? Vendor still wouldn’t get access to the info, since label is applied after the carrier gets the package. Then the delivery person wouldn’t have to faff around with a code.
Ofc, the carrier would have to be somehow prevented from selling the link from 17bkHdb74nKl to 123 Main Street. That may have to be solved legally, since they have a financial incentive to sell the link.
Provided the problems could be ironed out, I like the 1 time code idea. I like it a lot. It cuts a lot of the commercial surveilence ecosystem off at the knees.
Yeah, there would be a lot of potential for leaks, but if they are one-time-codes that wouldn’t be too bad.
Not a computer guy by any measure, but engineering a method to carry out banking and other financial operations on a zero-trust system might go a long way.
Welcome to bitcoin / etherium / etc.
I don’t know too much about out the culture and application level but some of the theory.
Bitcoin can transfer currency with ~zero knowledge (at least from one side) and Etherium can implement smart contracts.
I was under the impression only Monero was anonymous, Bitcoin definitely keeps all traceability in the ledger. That along with kyc means your wallet is tied to you. Any transfer to cold wallets as well.
Unless you mine yourself. Then truly zero knowledge. But yes if you try to buy bitcoin via a bank thing then it will be an issue.
Even bitcoin that you mine in its entirety yourself is traced to the cold wallet you mined it into. You then need to maintain a disconnect between your identity and your cold wallet. All coin going from your cold to hot wallet is on the ledger.
The only way to keep the entire transaction cold is to just divide your coin yourself and give the hash on paper.
Then the recipient can cash the hash, so to speak. Idk if it has to be verified on the network though. If so, the trace is re-established.
Maybe someone else that knows how it works better will come in and call me ignorant and spit some facts.
Note: I’m not suggesting that these are good solutions to the problem, only that they were engineered to solve this type of problem.
Is a UYC architecture viable at scale, or is the industry bound by too much engineering inertia…
I think KYC has nothing to do with engineering “inertia”, and everything to do with government “inertia”. And using the “inertia” metaphor: governments don’t get smaller, they only grow (like cancer), and the more “mass” they have, the harder it is to change their "inertia’.
We have been conditioned to believe that in technology and business, knowing more is always better. More data, more metrics, more profiles.
UYC is built on the opposite truth: when it comes to redundant personal data, unknowing is better than knowing.
If a server physically doesn’t know a user’s home address or phone number, that data can never be leaked, hacked, or abused. In this architecture, ignorance isn’t a limitation—it’s the ultimate security feature and a massive engineering optimization.
I’d love to hear your thoughts: can this shift from “hoarding by default” to “intentional ignorance” actually work at scale?
It can not, at least here in the EU the governments are actively fighting the ability to make a purchase without leaving your full personal data set. KYC-free businesses exist but are increasingly regulated to be full-KYC.
Similar on the other side of the pond. US & Canada both have legal KYC requirements for banking. We didn’t used to, but anti-laundering laws were passed. I think it’s also true for Mexico (?). We also have KYC laws to get a PO box in the US, and some other services too.
We don’t have legal KYC reqs for making purchases, and offline it is easy to use cash. Online tho, it’s very hard, borderline impossible to avoid a KYC-style trail even tho it isn’t a legal req. Some of that is b/c of the KYC laws around mailing addresses.
EU is outlawing non-KYC methods of payment in 2027. It will be a crime to accept an anonymous/gift visa card. They’re not issued in the EU for many years now, but now accepting foreign ones will be outlawed too.
I don’t recall anonymous PO boxes or bank accounts ever existing here. At least parcel locker pickup still works without KYC, but the media is already preparing ground with stories about drugs and terrorism.
Ugh! Surely that must just be for online payments? Or is there an EU wide plan to phase out cash for offline purchases? I heard some individual countries (not the entire ass EU) were moving to eliminate cash, but I thought it was still impractical to do it.
I’m worried about the future of cash payments here. Nearly every store or vendor accepts it, but nobody in my age group uses it. They’re all about Apple Pay or other payment apps. Aside from myself I only see old ppl using cash. It could fade out as they die off. If cash becomes a tiny %, it won’t be worth the overhead for vendors or stores to accept it. That would leave only digital-trail methods.
We still have anonymous gift cards. Well in US. Less sure about Can/Mex. But those are a huge target for fraud, so it’s hit and miss if they are accepted at any given place.
Yeah that’s for online payments. Cash stands strong where I live but they’re working on it, many chain stores have plenty of card-only self-checkout machines and a single cash register with a long queue.
It gets a lot of criticism for reasons, but Signal does this.
