This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 2nd,

2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Financial privacy is essential to a robustly free society.

In this country, financial privacy has been on the wane for at least the last four decades.

Cato's Nick Anthony is author of a new Cato policy analysis on financial privacy in our digital age. We spoke last week. I think it's safe to say

that financial privacy broadly is on the wane in the United States and that is it's unfortunate and part of that is technological

part of that is a bunch of old laws that have been on the books for a really long time that have been interpreted with fresh eyes, I suppose.

Part of that is court decisions.

So, you know, what are the big impediments as you see them in the history of

financial privacy that have or causing the biggest problems in terms of

people's ability to say,

no, this is none of your business, no you can't have access to my own, my financial

transactions. How do they reassert that?

It's really hard to say because there are so many problems. However, I think they really

boil down if we distill it all. It comes down to the fact that people just don't know what's taking place.

People think they have privacy, but it's really an illusion of privacy

because the laws we have in place say that you can't be told if a bank is reporting your

information to the government. You can't be told that they're filing 20 million

reports a year and who knows how many are on you. So you think that, oh, I locked it away, I have two-factor authentication,

I changed my password every month to something that is 32 characters long,

it can't be a real word.

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