Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelli58
But we are. We are who they are doing business with. ie: Thier customer. It may be a b2b customer, but a customer nonetheless.
and the part about how to pay you, that's the actual point of the law. They have to know who they are paying. That way they are on the hook if you turn out to be a shady ass fuck. They can't be like oh we didn't know he was a money laundering pyscho. We thought his name was Jim Smith.
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No. Affiliates are not customers of affiliate programs. On the "hook" for paying somebody who is shady? Apparently, you are too myopic to see the real shadiness, which is the collection of unnecessary personal information. How is any affiliate program/network responsible for the conduct of the people it pays affiliate commissions to? How does collecting information about its affiliates make affiliates less shady? So you are saying that because CCBill collects my home address rather than allowing me to use a PO Box, requiring me to provide a utility bill, somehow makes me an honest person?
Either an affiliate generating traffic and earning affiliate commissions is ipso facto dishonest and criminal and needs to be stopped no matter what, or there's nothing wrong with people joining affiliate programs and earning affiliate commissions. No amount of ID or personal information changes the nature of the act. We don't permit murder because the murderer provides ID. We don't prohibit murder because the murderer fails to provide ID. The act of murder is ipso facto evil. It's bad. No amount of ID or lack of ID makes earning affiliate commissions good or bad. What you write is nonsense. Money laundering? Again. CCBill is the PAYOR. The affiliate webmaster is the PAYEE. No amount of information about the PAYEE tells us about the origin of the funds from the PAYOR.
As far as whether or not you or I are shady people, that's not the responsibility of any affiliate program. CCBill is no more responsible for who I am than my neighbor down the road is.
To the contrary, using KYC regulations on affiliates serves as a pretext for organizations like CCBill to withhold legitimately earned funds, which is the real scandal. Not only that, collecting enough information on affiliate webmasters to satisfy KYC requirements provides CCBill with enough information to do truly dishonest and criminal things - e.g., opening up actual bank/merchant accounts in our names to do things like....launder funds. This reminds me of 2257 laws. You think 2257 laws stop child predators? So why are there child predators? If it weren't so seriously an invasion of everybody's business, it would be laughable. If you take a photo of a woman, you have to collect her ID for your records. The rationale? if you don't collect all of her information and hold onto it, you may be guilty of photographing a minor! Well think of how much more serious of an act actual sex is! Why not require people to collect the ID's of their sex partners and retain such ID to prove they aren't having sex with minors? For the sake of logical consistency, you should have to document the ID of each and every one of your sex partners. After all, you would have to do it for taking photographs of them! Not only do 2257 laws not stop any real crimes, they create new victimless crimes - i.e., failure to follow 2257 requirements.
And now with 2257 laws, everybody who starts an adult website can get the driver's licenses and SSNs of people who pose for the camera. You want to steal identities? Become an adult webmaster! Not only that, pursuant to your own logic, adult webmasters are so dishonest they can't honestly earn affiliate commisisons without affiliate programs collecting all of the information about the webmasters! Yet you support the same system that has made it incredibly easy for those same adult webmasters to get SSNs of adult models! Or start an affiliate network and then tell affiliates you need all of their information to pay them! You don't think there's anybody dishonest at CCBill? You don't think even companies do dishonest things? That was Wells Fargo that opened up fraudulent accounts for people. There's no legal reason CCBill needs to make affiliate webmasters satisfy KYC requirements to payout affiliate commissions. Especially when the payment would be a check or wire that has to clear a bank that already did KYC on the very same affiliate. It's not good enough to send the deposit to my bank account at a US bank that did KYC on me already? And if there were such mandates, those mandates would be wholly dangerous, compromising people's personal information, and should be jettisoned. Do you get this? The very process is facilitating identity theft, and identity theft is more often than not juxtaposed with other crimes. The very policies you defend are attracting dishonest people into the industry.
Quite frankly, there's no constitutional basis for the Social Security system to even exist, and there should be no such thing as a Social Security Number. Having a single, federalized identifier makes people far more vulnerable to identity theft. Different businesses and different entitities would use their own unique identifiers for people. But I see people have been so acclimated to the encroachment on our liberties that they just go along with such nonsense, spewing such things as: CCBill collecting utility bills of affiliate webmasters will make affiliate webmasters good people!
I feel like I'm trying to teach physics to cats.