The Bank of England is actively exploring the introduction of a retail digital Pound Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). In the course of its public engagement, through discussions and consultations, privacy has emerged as a key concern from a wide range of stakeholders and the general public, and is reinforced by often-sensational media coverage. 

Big Brother style scenarios are painted in which the Government can monitor us, control what we do and how we spend our money. But how valid are these concerns in practice? Will the government and central bank be able to track CBDC users on a transaction-by-transaction basis – and will they even want to? To what extent do features such as programmability pose a challenge to civil liberties?

Can privacy-enhancing technologies and concepts such as privacy by design help avert this sort of doomsday scenario from coming to pass? What is the role of digital identity in a digital money world? How are other countries’ CBDC experiments and designs handling privacy and what can we learn from them? And beyond this – is there potential for privacy and digital identity to become embedded into a CBDC architecture in such a way that they actually bring wider social and economic benefits and opportunities?

Join us on Wednesday 17 July for a summer evening of networking and debate, where we will dive into these issues headfirst – and in far more depth than the media headlines – with participants ranging from the sceptical to the optimistic!