I agree that KYC isn’t inherently evil. But the way its been weaponized is.

For instance in the telecommunications space it make total sense for mitigating spam SMS messages and Robocalls. But the carriers all sell your data for profit. They also don’t protect your data properly and are breached all the time. That’s malicious.

So no, I won’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and agree its an oversimplification to simply call KYC evil. But I also don’t blame people when all they see is abuse and never a good and proper implementation that isn’t exploitative.