This is the problem with "no politics at work": work has political salience. Politics concerns regulation of the world and work happens in the world.<p>Whenever an executive starts complaining[1] about how politics is impacting their workplace I see management incompetence. Politics exists. It exists for everyone. If your company is having an unusually difficult time getting work done in a given political environment, the conditions that are causing that probably have more to do with the company environment than politics writ large.<p>Prohibition is always a largely ineffective policy. People have feelings about the world. If you can't find a way to make space for those feelings somehow they will make their own space, often at the least convenient moment.<p>[1] Most recently this was Kraken CEO Jesse Powell
Crypto's biggest friction point imo has been that people are used to interacting [primarily with centralized services. Average people don't want to manage their own crypto wallet because they aren't used to being the sole person responsible for managing things like that. They don't want all their money to be tied to a single computer, or QR code, or device, they want it tied to an account held by a big company, where all they have to do is prove who they are to access their stuff.
Because of this habit it feels like decentralized services will always end up as a collection of siloed centralized services. And with centralized services you get things like this data selling. Unless there's a paradigm shift in how non-technical people interact with decentralized services things like this are going to keep happening. That said, they're saying they're only providing publicly available data to ICE, but if it's publicly available and non-identifiable, why does ICE even need it, and why wouldn't they be able to get it themselves? (I'm actually asking, if you know I'd love to hear).
The link should be changed to <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/06/29/crypto-coinbase-tracer-ice/" rel="nofollow">https://theintercept.com/2022/06/29/crypto-coinbase-tracer-i...</a>. Current Coindesk article is a poor rehash of the Intercept article, which is a lot more clear. The key question remains unanswered, but the original article at least points that out:<p>> The contract also provides, provocatively, “Historical geo tracking data,” though it’s unclear what exactly this data consists of or from where it’s sourced.<p>No idea how geo tracking data can be “fully sourced from online, publicly available data”.
> “All Coinbase Tracer features use data that is fully sourced from online, publicly available data, and do not include any personally identifiable information for anyone, or any proprietary Coinbase user data,” the spokesperson told CoinDesk.<p>If true, then all they're doing is analysis of data from the public blockchain. That sounds fine to me - the feds could have done it themselves.
"All Coinbase Tracer features use data that is fully sourced from online, publicly available data, and do not include any personally identifiable information for anyone, or any proprietary Coinbase user data."<p>Misleading headline. This is a public blockchain analytics service that has nothing to do with Coinbase's other services.
Two things.<p>First, Coinbase has a no-politics rule. I wonder where this falls. Since it's something business-related, I imagine it's fine to discuss internally, but this is an example where (if I was at Coinbase) I'd feel the no-politics-rule does the company a disservice. I'd be pretty mad if my company was selling to ICE and I wasn't allowed to say anything about it.<p>Second, it always amazes me how little these ICE contracts are, and how quick big companies (like Github) are willing to burn their credibility over such a relatively small amount of money.
FYI ICE does a lot of good work too like fighting child sex trafficking in other countries. ICE does a lot more than just immigration enforcement within the US borders.
This reminds me of what my chief legal council told me when I was negotiate a deal with another company for data services who we were really friendly with at the time. The gist: "Even if it is your best friend, you need to have very firm legal boundaries on what you are giving them access to as you don't know who will run the company or what their pressure points will be in the future and how they might use your data against your wishes".
This article is light on details. Given that they are saying all the info is derived from public sources, what is “historical geo tracking data”?<p>The transaction history is obviously from the blockchain (by design) but did IPs tied to transactions maybe leak at some point?
Thanks for pointing this out, I didn’t even know about the existence of these deals. I’ve had a Coinbase account for a while, but based on this I’ll be moving everything to a private wallet and closing my account ASAP. I have no desire to do business with a company that would do this.
> “Coinbase Tracer sources its information from public sources and does not make use of Coinbase user data.”<p>That’s seems pretty important. If it’s public, it’s public.
All these comments are about how this effects cryptocurrency in this or that way but the truth is, this story is not about cryptocurrency. It is about banking company doing bad things like all banks do regularly. It has almost nothing to do with cryptocurrency. The finance bros at the edge of the ecosystem are often mistaken for cryptocurrency by the speculator class.
Relevant quote from the article that headline readers may miss:<p>> Coinbase spokesperson Natasha LaBranche directed The Intercept to a disclaimer on its website stating “Coinbase Tracer sources its information from public sources and does not make use of Coinbase user data.”
Closing the coinbase account has been on my TODO list for a while now, and this article/headline was the little push I needed to get off my ass and do it.<p>Thanks OP.
Once Coinbase legally noted if they go bankrupt their customers would go bankrupt the crypto craze took a nosedive. When markets went down during COVID so did crypto but it shot up pretty quickly. So far not seeing that and personally after being reminded I could lose all my money if they went bankrupt Im less then thrilled to jump back in.
"Our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. Everyone deserves access to financial services that can help empower them to create a better life for themselves and their families."<p>If you didn't thing corporate missions statements were total bullshit before...
<i>The contract also provides, provocatively, “Historical geo tracking data,” though it’s unclear what exactly this data consists of or from where it’s sourced</i><p>I bet it’s source IP address geo location for transactions.
is the implicit assumption here that coinbase is selling data to ICE leading to the deportation of poor immigrant families, who you are presuming are On The Blockchain?<p>Or are they selling data that likely helps better understand drug/human traficking networks? Is selling data that helps with the latter considered bad??