EU's Big Brother Database: Tracking All Your Assets
Is this invasion of privacy coming to the US? Or is it already here?
So, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, the European Union is mulling over a plan to keep track of everyone’s assets by creating an asset database. Why, you ask? For your safety, of course! And we must be vigilant that such a violation of privacy does not come across the Atlantic to our shores. Or, perhaps it already has!
The EU is investigating a plan to track everyone’s real estate, bank accounts, securities, vehicles, works of art, and precious metals so that they can keep tabs on everyone and make sure they aren’t trying to “launder” any money without the EU first getting their hands on a piece of it via taxes. What is humorous about such an outlandish plan is that this EU has enacted too many online privacy laws. And I wonder how public officials and authoritarian regimes could misuse this information.
Do we have no more rights to privacy? I am not able to move money without our government knowing about it. The federal government already knows, for the most part, what most Americans’ income is. As a society, we should be looking in the other direction, in methods to increase one’s privacy from the government and decrease the government’s ability to seize one’s assets. We have seen multiple examples, often personally, of when our private sensitive financial information falls into the wrong hands, we certainly do not need another avenue for criminals to exploit.
Under current law, the EU and the U.S. differ in many ways. For example, according to Bloomberg Law, the EU’s “General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, defines the data subject as a natural person in the EU. The personal data covered by the law is defined as any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. It excludes “pseudonymised” data, but does not exclude publicly available data. Recital 162 indicates that GDPR applies to the processing of personal data for statistical purposes. The California Consumer Privacy Act, one of the strongest in the U.S., (CCPA), protects the consumer, which is defined as a natural person who is a California resident. CCPA applies to information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household. CCPA excludes de-identified data, publicly available information, and aggregate information.”
In March 2024, we learned of a new report in the U.S. exposing massive warrantless federal government surveillance of Americans' financial data. The report reveals alarming evidence of federal law enforcement engaging in broad financial surveillance and prying into the private transactions of American consumers. This surveillance, not predicated on specific evidence of criminal conduct, targeted terms and transactions related to core political and religious expressions protected by the Constitution.
This type of behavior by our own federal government, let alone the EU, shows the unquenchable thirst authoritarian governments have for being our overlords, to be blunt, and how seemingly small actions to thwart “crime” become slippery slopes to violations of our rights
