What Do Recent Legislative Developments Mean For Crypto Users' Privacy

In the midst of the fallout from the news that Facebook had casually handed the private data of its 87 mln users to an unsavory electioneer firm, US Congress sneaked in a major piece of online privacy legislation, known as the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act.The document was tagged onto the coattails of a trillion-something-dollar omnibus spending bill, and therefore had no chance for any earnest legislative review of its own.

What exactly is in the CLOUD Act?Essentially, the Act does two things with the data that American tech companies store.

From the day the CLOUD Act is signed into law, all data hosted by any American provider anywhere in the world is a fair game for the US law enforcement, from local police to feds.

Another big concern is that under the CLOUD Act, unlike the law it had amended, foreign governments' requests for data can be approved without going to a US court.

We all remember too well that IRS has its own means of compelling crypto exchanges to turn over user's data.

Recent Snowden revelations illustrated how intelligence services are ready to go to great lengths in obtaining crypto users' data, and how unscrupulous they may be in choosing the means of doing so.

It is still a feasible scenario under which law-abiding citizens, which the vast majority of crypto users are, can lose control over their personal data.

For sure, these governments will not be among the most oppressive ones, but the lack of due process in approving bilateral agreements, as well as the lack of judicial oversight in handling individual requests for data, might produce an environment where the power of law enforcement to request and use personal information of Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail users around the world goes almost entirely unchecked.

Intimidating as it sounds, there is also another possibility that privacy advocates tend to consider less frequently: that the new rules for data use could prove efficient in helping law enforcement do their job.

While this remains quite possible, it is also true that very soon more people, in raw numbers, will be getting access to more sensitive data, among which your wallet address and crypto transactions may accidentally come across.