When you open an account with Swan, you are entering into a custodial relationship with a licensed and regulated trust company, which will provide services including ACH transfers from your bank, exchanges of dollars for Bitcoin, and other related financial services. Under US Law, companies providing financial services are required to comply with regulations including the USA Patriot Act, which requires identifying your customers for the purposes of crime prevention ("Know Your Customer / Anti Money Laundering"). These regulations are the law, and until that law is changed, we will continue to follow it regardless of our personal views on the matter.
We understand that privacy is important to our customers. This is why we specifically chose Persona due to their compliance with US/EU privacy regulations including GDPR, and because they have an explicit feature called Redact which deletes your data from their servers, unlike many identity verification providers, which do not even supply such a feature or make it difficult to use.
Persona is founded by ex-Square and ex-Dropbox personnel, it is certified under US/EU privacy laws: including Privacy Shield, GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2. Additionally, we remove personal data after you pass identity verification through a Redaction process.
You can find out more about their customer base here.