The board member criticised the pursuit of profit by private companies and stressed that it was in their commercial interest to collect data about their users. Panetta told the Financial Times that the ECB is not like private companies and has no commercial interest in storing, managing or monetising user data.
He also confirmed that the European Central Bank has carried out pilot projects testing offline payments for small amounts where no data is stored outside the wallets of the payer and payee. Furthermore, he states that when the central bank is involved in digital payments, privacy is better protected and that payments go through, without anyone in the payment chain having access to all data.
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