US Congress Wrestles With Financial Technologies and Data Privacy

On Nov. 21, the United States Congressional Task Force on Financial Technologies held a hearing on the role of big data in financial services.

The flip side, as the task force seemed to acknowledge, is that many of those financial opportunities approach consumer data predatorily.

A cryptographer, Kamara showed a unique insight into ways that technology itself could limit financial service providers' access to consumer data.

More optimistic in tone, Don Cardinal, managing director of the Financial Data Exchange, pointed to industry moves away from data practices like screen-scraping, in which customer login information is accessible to aggregators.

Duane Pozza, a partner at law firm Wiley Rein, sought to define the concept of big data and emphasize its role in expanding financial services.

Instances of massive financial data breaches including Equifax and Capital One loomed large over the proceedings.

New York's regulation 23 NYCRR 500 placed new burdens on cybersecurity for companies handling client financial data.

Cointelegraph got the chance to follow up with Kamara on the subject after the hearing, during which time he highlighted the availability of technology "That allows us to process data without ever seeing it. So you can hold your data, you don't ever have to release it to anybody, but I can still compute on your data and get some kind of signal from it." When Cointelegraph asked him about zero-knowledge proofs as an example, Kamara responded that "You can do similar things for computation as well. So not just proving identity, or proving knowledge of something, but computing as well."

Cardinal, whose work at Financial Data Exchange involves implementing FDX's API, showed a particularly rosey outlook on the industry's willingness to change its own practices internally.

Democrat outrage over new financial data practices targeting vulnerable groups through predatory lending and discriminatory algorithms met with Republican frustration with the obvious inability of even the most savvy of consumers to cope with the ways that their data are being manipulated beyond their control.