“Privacy is hygiene,” Ethereum developer Vitalik Buterin says after bank data breach

Customer data from major US banks including JPMorgan, Citi and Morgan Stanley may have been compromised in a cyberattack on mortgage technology vendor SitusAMC. Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin comments on privacy as a practice of “hygiene”.

The breach stemmed from unauthorized access to SitusAMC’s systems, and it was confirmed on Saturday that threat actors had exfiltrated data related to multiple large financial institutions.

The company said the leaked data included “accounting records and legal contracts” as well as “certain data relating to some customers,” but that the scope, nature and extent of the breach remained under investigation.

In response to the breach, Buterin argued that privacy should be treated as basic digital “hygiene” rather than optional.

“Privacy is not a feature. Privacy is hygiene,” Buterin said in response to the first reported tweet about the incident. new york times.

Ethereum and privacy

Buterin’s response is indicative of a broader argument he has made this year that positions privacy not as an add-on but as a baseline requirement for digital systems.

In an April essay, he outlined a path for Ethereum to support stealth addresses, selective disclosure, and application-level zero-knowledge tools, aiming to reduce the exposure of structured data found in both traditional finance and public blockchains.

“Calling privacy ‘hygiene’ is a useful reset,” said Shiv Shankar, CEO of Boundless, a decentralized marketplace for zero-knowledge computing. decryption. Shankar added that privacy “should be in the same category as server patching and key rotation; it should be routine, non-negotiable, and built into the infrastructure, not a premium feature added later.”

In October, the Ethereum Foundation launched a new privacy-focused cluster and announced the first details about Kohaku, a privacy-centric browser wallet and software development kit developed by Nicolas Consigny and Buterin that debuted at EFDevcon in Argentina last week.

Privacy as a principle, then privacy as a technology

This shift in focus comes as privacy, both as a principle and as a set of technologies built to uphold it, is receiving renewed attention across major chains.

Ethereum is advancing protocol-level tools in parallel with continued work on a new privacy layer 2 chain. Bitcoin We are working on Taproot-enabled upgrades and a wallet-based approach. Solana It has consolidated around Light Protocol after earlier projects like Elusiv were discontinued.

“With privacy by default, everyone automatically benefits from strong cryptographic protection, without having to understand complex tools or make conscious privacy decisions for each transaction,” said Quinten van Welzen, head of strategy and communications at Zano, a privacy-focused L1 blockchain. decryption.

Zcash is also gaining traction. Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency designed to allow users to choose between transparent transactions and fully secured transactions that use zero-knowledge proofs to hide senders, recipients, and amounts. Last week, the Nasdaq-listed treasury firm added to its stake in ZEC, pushing the company’s stock price up 469% over the past month.

Still, privacy as a principle has been built into cryptocurrencies since their early days, especially in relation to traditional financial systems.

“Banks must be trusted to store our money and transfer money electronically, but they lend out in waves of credit bubbles with little reserves,” Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, wrote in 2009. “We must trust banks with our privacy and trust them not to let identity thieves access our accounts.”