"Privacy is hygiene," says Vitalik Buterin after banking data leak.

Source: PortaldoBitcoin Original Title: “Privacy is hygiene,” says Vitalik Buterin after bank data leak Original Link: Data from clients of major U.S. banks, including JPMorgan, Citi, and Morgan Stanley, may have been exposed in a cyber attack on the mortgage technology company SitusAMC, leading the blockchain community to debate privacy.

The breach resulted from unauthorized access to SitusAMC's systems, which confirmed that a malicious agent had extracted data related to several major financial institutions.

The exposed data included “accounting records and legal contracts”, as well as “certain data relating to some of our clients' customers”, while the scope, nature, and extent of the breach are still under investigation, the company said.

The violation led Vitalik Buterin to argue that privacy should be treated as a basic digital “hygiene” rather than something optional.

“Privacy is not a feature. Privacy is hygiene,” he said in response to the incident.

Ethereum and Privacy

Vitalik Buterin's response refers to a broader argument he has been developing, in which he defines privacy as a basic requirement for digital systems, rather than a mere complement.

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

“Calling privacy 'hygiene' is a useful reboot,” said a zero-knowledge computing expert. He added that privacy “should be in the same category as patching servers or key rotation: routine, non-negotiable, and integrated into the infrastructure; it should not be a premium feature added later.”

In October, the Ethereum Foundation launched a new cluster focused on the theme and released initial details about Kohaku, a privacy-centered browser wallet and software development kit, developed by Nicolas Consigny and Buterin, which was presented at EFDevcon in Argentina.

Privacy as a principle, and then as a technology

This shift in focus occurs at a time when privacy, both as a principle and as a set of technologies created to maintain it, has attracted renewed attention in major retail networks.

Ethereum is enhancing protocol tools alongside ongoing work on new layer one blockchains for privacy; Bitcoin is working on Taproot-enabled updates and wallet-based approaches; Solana is consolidating around the Light Protocol following the closure of previous projects.

“Privacy by default ensures that everyone automatically benefits from strong cryptographic protections, without needing to understand complex tools or make conscious privacy decisions for each transaction,” said a chief strategy officer of a privacy-focused blockchain.

Attention has also turned to privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, designed to allow users to choose between transparent transactions and fully protected transactions that hide the sender, receiver, and amount using zero-knowledge proofs.

However, privacy as a principle has been present in cryptocurrencies since their inception, especially in the context of their relationship with the traditional financial system.

“Banks should be trustworthy to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with a tiny fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trusting that they won't allow identity thieves to drain our accounts,” wrote Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, in 2009.