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.
That cash is analogous to UYC is a beautiful irony that is fundamentally true. I believe the harm caused by collecting, storing, and processing personal data has already equaled the perceived harm of refusing to do so. What we need now is a reasonable methodology in software engineering — a realization by every developer that unnecessary personal data is just digital waste that degrades infrastructure through its compounding weight, stored simply because “that’s how it’s always been done.” We must design our systems to be selective and, just like in the physical world, always give users the choice to either share data or use the service without registration. Cheers!