When we talk about privacy online, we usually picture companies harvesting our data, platforms tracking our movements, governments peering into our accounts. We rarely picture a blind woman in Islamabad who closes her banking app because an unlabeled button has just forced her to either wait until she gets home to finish a task or do it at work and reveal her bank balance to a colleague.
That second scenario is a privacy crisis, too. It is just a quieter one, and it falls on people who can least afford to absorb it.
My research on digital financial inclusion for blind persons in Pakistan makes the point with uncomfortable clarity. The study—Banking on Rights, based on a survey of 120 blind and low-vision respondents and 18 follow-up interviews—found that inaccessibility is not merely an inconvenience. It is a mechanism that systematically strips users of their financial privacy and, with it, their autonomy and safety.
When Access Fails, Privacy Is the First Casualty
Start with the numbers. Only about 17% of respondents, and mostly with low vision too, could use an ATM without help. Fewer than half could fully operate their bank’s mobile app independently, and only a quarter rated their app as truly accessible. ATMs lacked audio guidance; apps used unlabeled buttons and authentication screens that screen readers could not navigate; websites threw up visual CAPTCHAs that no blind user could solve alone.
Each gap has the same downstream effect. When a person cannot complete a transaction independently, they must bring someone in—a family member, a colleague, a teller, sometimes a stranger in confidence. And the moment they do, their PIN, their balance, their salary timing, and their spending patterns stop being private. This is what I call “digital coercion”: the forced surrender of authentication credentials caused not by carelessness but by design. The user did not choose to share their PIN. The interface chose for them.
One participant, the journalist Sardar Ahmed Pirzada, described what that surrender feels like: sharing your PIN, he said, is like standing exposed in front of another person—handing over the very key that was supposed to keep your affairs private.
Privacy Is Not Separable from Trust
For most of us, poor usability produces frustration. In banking, the stakes are higher, because privacy and trust are bound together. A blind user who cannot independently verify a payee, interpret a one-time password (OTP) screen, or confirm that a transfer went through has rational grounds to distrust the platform. As one anonymous respondent put it, even basic tasks become impossible when a screen reader announces only “button” or “JavaScript” instead of saying what the control actually does. A system you cannot verify is not, from your standpoint, trustworthy.
But the research surfaces a second, less obvious harm. Inaccessibility does not only erode trust in the technology; it corrodes trust in the relationships people are forced to rely on. When you must repeatedly disclose your balance and salary timing to access your own money, those disclosures accumulate into vulnerability—and the study documents how people exploit it.
Once helpers learned how much money participants had, casual loan requests followed, hard to refuse precisely because the other person had seen the balance. One participant described someone who, after assisting with a single ATM withdrawal, tried to install himself as a permanent intermediary. None of this was fraud in the legal sense. All of it shows how forced dependence opens a door that privacy is meant to keep shut.
Why This Is an Internet Issue, Not Just a Disability Issue
It would be easy to file all this under “accessibility” and move on. That would be a mistake.
The promise of digital finance is that it lets people manage money privately and on equal terms. That promise rests on the same foundations as a trustworthy Internet: that users can verify what a system is doing, control their own credentials, and participate without surrendering their dignity. When a banking app fails a blind user, it is not only an accessibility failure. It is a failure of the privacy and trust guarantees the digital economy claims to extend to everyone.
The research frames this through functional access—the gap between nominally having a service and being able to use it independently, privately, and repeatedly. A person can own a smartphone, hold an account, possess a debit card, and still be locked out in practice. Measuring inclusion by connectivity or account ownership overstates how many people the digital economy genuinely serves. The honest measure is whether someone can complete a whole banking task without handing their privacy to a bystander.
Designing Privacy Back In
The encouraging part is that the fixes exist, and most are good practice for everyone.
Authentication is the clearest example. Every core transaction flow should offer at least one secure, non-visual pathway. Visual-only CAPTCHAs, gesture-dependent confirmations, and unreachable OTP screens are the exact points where users get pushed into sharing credentials. Biometric options like fingerprint and voice authentication, designed and tested with blind users, let people authenticate without revealing a secret to anyone.
Around that sits a familiar accountability architecture: accessibility as a binding obligation rather than an aspiration, with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a baseline and task-based testing with blind users on top; no major update shipped without accessibility testing, since features that work today routinely break after tomorrow’s redesign; and accessible, time-bound complaint channels. The European Accessibility Act and recent U.S. rules show that accessibility improves most where standards are enforceable and non-compliance carries real consequences.
What ties these together is a principle privacy advocates already champion: build for independence and verification from the start, rather than retrofitting accommodations onto a system designed for someone else.
The Point
Privacy is too often treated as a luxury—something you trade away for convenience. The experience of blind banking users inverts that. For them, privacy is the difference between managing their own money with dignity and being permanently exposed to whoever is standing nearby. An Internet worth building is one where that exposure is not the price of admission.
The next time we ask whether a digital service “works,” we should ask not only whether people can reach it, but whether they can use it without giving themselves away. For millions of users, that is the whole question.
This piece draws on the research study Banking on Rights: A Case Study of Digital Financial Inclusion for Blind Persons in Pakistan by Dr. Muhammad Shabbir, supported by the Interledger Foundation. Named individuals are quoted with their consent.