The biggest new threat to privacy in 2023 wasn’t any surveillance program. It was the false advertising Big Tech companies use to trick people into thinking their products are private. Like oil companies claiming fossil fuels are “green”, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others increasingly try to convince people their surveillance-based advertising models are “private” when they’re not. This sneaky marketing practice is known as privacy washing(new window).

Crypto exchange Binance has added a "monitoring tag" to certain cryptocurrencies, including privacy coins Monero, Zcash, Horizen, and Firo. Tokens with the monitoring tag are subject to regular reviews and are at risk of being delisted from the exchange if they no longer meet listing criteria. Users are required to pass a quiz to trade tokens marked with the monitoring tag. Binance's decision to mark privacy coins with a monitoring tag comes as the exchange has opened its books to monitoring by US financial regulators and law enforcement, following its multi-billion-dollar settlement with US regulators.

OKX, a popular crypto exchange, has announced that it will delist several privacy tokens, including Monero, in 2024. The decision to delist 11 different tokens was based on OKX's own guidelines and feedback from its users. Customers have been advised to cancel any orders relating to these trading pairs before the delisting time arrives, otherwise, they will be automatically canceled by the exchange. While OKX has not specified which tokens are being delisted due to low activity versus feedback from users, Monero and ZCash are both quite popular within the market and have tangible growth potential.

On December 8th, Namada, a Layer1 protocol that focuses on privacy, announced that the RPGF airdrop has officially launched. It will close on December 28th, 2023 at 17:00. Participants who meet the requirements can submit their Namada genesis account through rpgfdrop.namada.net. The submitted account will be included in the Namada genesis block proposal proposed by the Anoma Foundation, with the corresponding declaration of NAM tokens. Once the Namada mainnet is launched, RPGF airdrop participants will be able to directly access their submitted accounts on the chain.

Guy Corem, a member of the Beam Foundation Board of Directors, announced that Beam will undergo its second halving in January 2024 (5 years after the mainnet launch), marking the end of Beam Treasury releases. Miners (currently limited to GPUs) will mine 20 new Beam per minute instead of 40. The second halving also marks the time when Beam's circulation reaches 60%. In addition, Beam engineer @Vlad38604806 is considering upgrading Beam's L1 to Kaspa's DAG Knight variant. According to CoinGecko data, BEAM tokens have risen over 320% in the past 24 hours.<br>According to the Beam website, Beam uses fair distribution with no pre-mining or ICO, following a deflationary issuance plan starting at 100 BEAM per block, halving regularly. The total supply is 262,800,000 BEAM. For the first five years (until January 3, 2024), 20% of block issuance revenue will go into the Beam Treasury.

Cecilia Skingsley, head of the Innovation Center at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), stated that central banks around the world are not interested in personal data. This statement seems to be aimed at alleviating privacy concerns surrounding CBDCs, as the central bank group has been pushing governments around the world to continue their work on CBDCs in preparation for the future of payments. However, major jurisdictions such as the United States and the European Union are facing increasing criticism over their plans to issue CBDCs, with a major issue being whether and how citizens' privacy will be protected. Skingsley urged the public to remain open to technological innovation, and she believes that wholesale CBDCs are another form of currency used only between banks, which could become a "game changer" for cross-border payments, citing BIS Innovation Center projects such as Jura, Dunbar, and mBridge as examples.

A report from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) found that privacy should be considered a key component of CBDC design. The BIS report surveyed 3,500 people to understand how the use of CBDC as a payment method would vary based on privacy levels, and found that privacy increased participants' willingness to use CBDC by 60% when purchasing privacy-sensitive products.

According to The Block, Nocturne, a privacy protocol, has deployed its V1 version on the Ethereum mainnet, introducing the concept of on-chain private accounts to Ethereum.<br>According to a statement, the protocol is another account, rather than a unique tool or ecosystem. Unlike existing blockchain privacy tools (which usually exist as independent entities), Nocturne integrates privacy directly into the account layer, similar to a smart contract wallet.<br>The team stated that Nocturne is compatible with any DeFi protocol that represents state through output tokens, such as Uniswap exchange tokens, Aave aTokens, and Compound cTokens. It plans to extend this compatibility over time to a wider range of decentralized applications, creating private user accounts that are fully compatible with existing Ethereum accounts on Layer 1 and Layer 2.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is using an AI-powered tool called Giant Oak Search Technology (GOST) to scan social media posts for content deemed "derogatory" to the U.S. The use of AI in border control has raised concerns about privacy and ethical implications. GOST assists the agency by scrutinizing social media posts and determining their potential risk to the U.S. The public remains skeptical of AI, especially where personal privacy is concerned.

Nocturne, a New York City-based company that offers on-chain private accounts, has raised $6 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital, with participation from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and other members of the Ethereum community, as well as Bankless Ventures, HackVC, and Robot Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate the production and deployment of Nocturne's protocol across various ecosystems, as well as to fund legal work to navigate the changing regulatory environment. Nocturne plans to launch on mainnet within the next month, providing a compliant non-custodial privacy option to retail users and allowing for integrations with wallets, payment companies, and other strategic partners.