Why is online privacy so important?

• You might want to stop advertisers building a profile as a result of them tracking your spending habits or you don't want to be tracked as a result of sensitive purchases

• You might want to prevent others from knowing the value of your assets.

• You want to decrease the chances of getting hacked.

• You might own a business and trade secrets are important.

• If you have a private client list, you might want to keep other businesses from knowing and poaching your clients.

Before I write further, I'd like to point out to those who may not know: Bitcoin IS NOT private. Despite all the news about how cyber criminals seem to favor Bitcoin as a means of trafficking their ill-gotten gains, Bitcoin isn't as private as you think.
Every Bitcoin transaction stores the wallet addresses of the sender and receiver, the amount transacted as well as the date and time. "But my wallet doesn't have my name on it!" You would argue. 
Well.. a cyber investigator can still track you using clues like common IP addresses used, and your transaction history. UNLESS you are using a coin mixer. 

In the cryptocurrency space, there has been a concerted effort to build in privacy features:

• Privacy coins exist, like Monero, Dash, Pivx, Zcash, etc

• Coin mixers like Bitcoin Blender, Helix, etc

• Exchanges that don't require KYC like decentralized exchanges, or just lesser known exchanges.

• Decentralized swap services. The most famous is arguably Uniswap

I'd like to tell a story:

I worked in compliance once. An exceptionally large transaction triggered the alerts and we looked into it. Turned out that upon further investigation, the transaction was going to be transferred to a flagged individual who is on a international watchlist, and the chain of transactions went through several convoluted transactions obviously designed to throw off any tracking efforts.
Needless to say, we froze the transaction and reported the matter to the authorities.

But here's a question for you:
Given that criminals can hide in the crypto space using these privacy measures, is privacy actually something that aids criminals?
Phrased another way, is Privacy SO important that it's ok to allow these bad actors to run rampant?

Conclusion:

I think there should be varying levels of privacy. I think its hard to determine what can/should be known, and what can/should be hidden. 
Privacy continues to be a hot topic of debate, and I hope to tell this story to inspire inner reflection/debate amongst everyone.

Thank you for reading and I hope this has been useful.

If you like it, some tips would be much appreciated:

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