In Romanian there is an expression - "din lac in put" - translated word by word to "from lake to well". Its meaning is that you got out of a bad situation and jumped into another, just as bad or worse.
I've just read this morning there is a scandal surrounding the acquisition of the blockchain tracking startup Neutrino by Coinbase. It seems the founders of this firm sold in the past surveillance applications to government agencies and corporations. I'm not clear if they knew these applications will be used for dirty purposes, or they just made the apps and the customers used them as they saw fit (that's a lame excuse). Without knowing anything about these apps, just by knowing their types and their customers, I have at least a big question mark.
But there is more. Coinbase knew about the past of these founders and their involvement in these deals. And they decided to move on with the acquisition.
What was perplexing for me was their justification. They needed to push forward with the acquisition because their current tracking providers were selling client data to outside sources (source).
That's "great news" if you are a Coinbase client! Your data might have been sold already. Does that remind you of a certain monster company?
If there's any consolation (it isn't for me), we found out about this from Coinbase, as opposed to a third party.
The solution they found to mitigate the risk of more client data selling seems to come with its own risk leverage, and certainly not received well by the crypto community.
