Thought the Federal Reserve raising interest rates was bad? Wait until they freeze your ability to get paid.

Seamless money transfers? State of the art security and tracking features? A hassle-free payment service backed by the Fed? No annoying third-party systems? What’s not to love about the Federal Reserve’s new FedNow Service?

Quite a lot, actually.

Despite the aforementioned ‘conveniences’, being a part of a FedNow insured business or bank will only give the federal government more power over your personal finances. As a customer, you have little say—if any—in this program’s rollout. If your bank opts in, you do too. That means your bank information and monetary transactions will be made available to and ‘facilitated’ by the FedNow system. No if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. This could make heightened federal surveillance on citizens and businesses a very real possibility down the road.

FedNow could potentially replace private services (like PayPal and Venmo) if businesses decide to go all in on the new endeavor. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

FedNow allows participants to seamlessly transfer funds to one another without delay while providing government-level security and support across various payment activities. Think of it as a ‘helping hand’ by Uncle Sam for when you order off of Amazon or make an ATM withdrawal. FedNow will also be implemented for people in the private-sector who have bank accounts tied to a Federal Reserve bank.

As FedNow has been given the green light after successful trial runs with select volunteer companies, we are now seeing its early adoption with institutions like JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo Bank, U.S Bank, BNY Mellon, and many others—all banks that consumers trust to hold their hard-earned money. FedNow’s current soft launch has dozens of various participating commercial banks across the country running customer service testing and live transactions to ensure everything goes swimmingly.

Even though the Federal Reserve itself says the government will not have access to individual accounts and cannot “control how they choose to spend their money,” the very notion of a federally operated transfer system determining how quickly and when we get paid is a little too close to home. The Reserve promises that it won’t peek into people’s accounts; who’s to say they can’t, now that they will have access to any and all information allotted to them by participating institutions? If this is abused, no longer will people have the luxury of private transactions between consenting parties. The State will be privy to every deposit you get from work, every little Amazon purchase, and each and every sale you make on Facebook Marketplace, eBay, Target, and more.

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