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Am I being cynic here or is this just another attempt at total surveillance? It solves a problem that does not exist, will likely be mandatory at some point and

Am I being cynic here or is this just another attempt at total surveillance? It solves a problem that does not exist, will likely be mandatory at some point and is executed by a defense company.

woodpanel 4y ago
I'm guessing more like a/multiple "recently privatized" ex-national telecommunications provider (ie blue chip company with the state as majority stakeholder). You know, "plausible deniability" and stuff… Edit: I stand corrected, with Thales writing this article, we can expect conglomorates such as Thales or Siemens to build this as well (corporations that due to their long standing national prominence are de-facto state-entities, although not de-jure).
threeseed 4y ago
I can't see much of a difference compared to a passport or driver's license. The quiet explosion in CCTV cameras across Europe is far more a threat than some unique identifier.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > passport or driver's license Physical documents. This is an electronic system, with potential for issues as you (in this crowd) should suspect. > is far more a threat Which definitely concerns us in its own turn - who the daughter is dating will take its own slot.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
    The data on the document is just a snapshot of the data in electronic systems. These systems are used every single day when you use physical documents in healthcare or any other government-related scenarios to double-check on that physical document.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      > The data on the document is just a snapshot of the data in electronic systems. These systems are used every single day The issue is not with the governmental database, taken for granted. It is with the consequences brought by the electronic system on the user side.
scrollaway 4y ago
Just because you don't see the problem it is solving doesn't mean the problem does not exist. Some context: I'm French, I live in Belgium. I have two e-IDs cards: one french, one belgian. When I need to identify myself, depending on the government I have to deal with, I have to use either my "FranceConnect" credentials, or my Belgian e-ID card. When using my Belgian eID, there is a government login called CSAM, but a lot of people here use a private company called "itsme" (https://www.itsme-id.com/ https://www.itsme-id.com/). ItsMe does not support Linux. CSAM does, but not every service that supports or even requires eID login here supports CSAM. FranceConnect is even more of a mess. French government has a plethora of online services, several with their own logins and not all support FranceConnect. Making a digital wallet won't increase surveillance... surveillance is already possible on all of this, quite easily so. What it will do is greatly simplify life for people dealing with these systems; especially for expats and new arrivals into a country, who might get stuck in the loop of "You need a bank account to get your ID" "You need an ID to open a bank account" Not to mention all the services that do their own shitty KYC and would be better served by using automated ID checking instead. Unless you think it's better and "more private" to email a photocopy of your ID and passport to somebody who will forward it three times, save it on their computer, and share it on Slack with the tech team because there's a problem with their shitty KYC system.
- woodpanel 4y ago
  > Making a digital wallet won't increase surveillance... surveillance is already possible on all of this, Sure, because a little minority of people has "the burden" of managing multiple IDs, lets tear down one firewall between citizenry and big-brother for the rest of us.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    What's the "firewall" in this case? eIDs already exist all over the place, as demonstrated in parent. They also clearly have their use, even though they are currently frequently broken. Is the brokenness the firewall?
    - 4y ago
snypox 4y ago
It solves on problem for me. Since the introduction of Apple Pay I hate taking my wallet anywhere and 95% of the time I don’t. But my ID and driver’s license is in there and it’s needed sometimes. This gets me closer to the goal. Let’s say, travelling to a different country without a wallet would be amazing to me.
kabes 4y ago
It does solve a problem that exists. In fact the use cases are listed in the article: filing tax reports, opening/accessing bank accounts, etc. Basically the stuff where in the offline world you would've needed to show your ID. However, many (all?) EU members already have developed their own national system. So this tries to unionize those systems so dealing with other member nations becomes easier. Today I often have to mail a bunch of documents if I want to prove my business ownership to foreign companies.
- TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  Doesn't Estonia have its own E-Estonia X-road system that already does these things, using cryptography for verification and non-repudiation? So why do we need this newer, more expensive, dystopian stuff made by some private company? How do I vote against this? Oh wait, it's the EU...so I can't.
- sathishmanohar 4y ago
  and eventually those tax reports and credit ratings will be tied to super market checkout systems. So governments can pick and choose which tax payers can eat what. Any data that is aggregated is open to abuse by the aggregator and it will be definitely abused if the aggregator is a government body.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    I'd much rather have my government have info about me than Facebook. Even in your contrived dystopia, I'd rather have a democratic government be the Big Brother than some unelected tech CEO.
    - closewith 4y ago
      That's a false dichotomy. We can create a world where our right to privacy is respected by both governments and the private sector.
      - 4y ago
mordae 4y ago
> Am I being cynic here or is this just another attempt at total surveillance? I don't think so. The idea is to make the wallet offline. > It solves a problem that does not exist, I does exist. Automatically checking identity is hard. Some counties apparently issued certificates to their citizens and enabled them being verified by anyone, simplifying several online businesses patterns. > will likely be mandatory at some point More like fast lane. But eventually (30 years) probably yes. > and is executed by a defense company. Every country is responsible for their own part. There are going to be ETSI standards for interoperability. The actual trouble here is that (at least in my country) the officials responsible believe that rooted phone is higher security risk than automatic updates from Chinese government.
- closewith 4y ago
  > Automatically checking identity is hard. This seems like a feature, not a bug.
  - stubish 4y ago
    Every single non-cash transaction you make every single day needs to check your identity. Currently it is outsourced to banks, multinationals like visa, thousands of different government departments providing trusted docs (usually a few different ones per country). And a lot of fraud happens because we do a bad job at it. Or for-profits, doing 'good enough' where 'better' isn't profitable, because they get to pass on the trauma of identity theft to the victims.
radicalbyte 4y ago
I'm involved in a group who come into contact with this. It's not about surveillance, it's about providing European governments, European economy and citizens with electronic ID in all situations without having to rely on Google/Apple/Facebook. So you can have a secure way to login to websites, with many personas, without having to share your GAF (and thus be tracked by GAF / share GAF data with yet another party). Thales on the other hand are not what I would describe as a good actor but rather one of the "usual suspects".
- closewith 4y ago
  Providing governments with a de facto mandatory electronic ID for every citizen is inherently providing the means to surveil, though. I also wonder how this will be regarded in countries like Ireland, which doesn't have a national ID card and where a recent attempt to make a similar digital ID system mandatory was ruled unlawful (PSC/MyGovID).
  - slartibardfast0 4y ago
    Ireland can't really do a national id scheme without mutual agreement with the UK due to the common travel area & mutual residence rights (including voting at parliamentary level upon taking residence) that are dealt with in an ad-hoc manner for many reasons. due to this, Ireland has default opt-out on justice & home affairs issues. however, as an EU citizen, I can see immediate advantages to a cautiously administered digital id. as it is, many states within the EU demand a national tax id on registration for services as simple as bike rental, such a digital id would presumably supersede such nonsense and help further the single market everyone is working towards.
  - radicalbyte 4y ago
    The regulation will have to make that illegal - there are several countries who would block the regulation it if it wasn't. So the situation will be better for us than today - there will be more options providing the ID (and wallets), including highly privacy-preserving tech based on modern encryption techniques. That will make it much harder to be tracked by commercial players and much harder to be tracked legally by governments. For the blackhat / illegal security agencies: you might make it a little harder because the US-compromised companies (FAANG + MS) aren't (always) involved.
nix23 4y ago
>just another attempt at total surveillance? Well yes, have you seen what europol can do now? Safe and analyze data even from unsuspected people. German: https://www.heise.de/news/Europols-Mandat-zur-Massenueberwachung-tritt-in-Kraft-7157752.html https://www.heise.de/news/Europols-Mandat-zur-Massenueberwac...
cm2187 4y ago
Most of the examples mentioned in the article already require your identity (opening bank account, tax return, etc). Others are outright creepy. You can't access medecine without verifying your ID? That locks lots of people out of access to healthcare (illegals, tourists, etc). Age verification? So porn websites will store the real id of all their visitors (or alternatively a central EU age verification system will be notified every time you visit such a website)? In France for instance it is illegal to identify people by their social security number in a system (at least it was 20 years ago). That's a safeguard to prevent it from making it too easy to correlate an identity across many systems. This ID scheme will go around that. To be honest I think that law was passed at a time where surveillance was still considered evil. I think governements of most liberal democracies today are actually entertaining stasi-style surveillance as a greater good.
- wewxjfq 4y ago
  Age verification already works with the current digital IDs and it's made in a way that doesn't leak your personal data. In general you get to see what personal data is being requested before you agree to transmit it. The IDs can also create pseudonyms, so different systems don't know that you are the same person. I opted out of the digital functions of my ID, but I plan to have them activated, because it's better than video identification or uploading scans of my documents. That being said, I hope that only serious processes will adopt this.
  - zeeZ 4y ago
    In the context of German ID cards, this is mostly correct. For age verification requests, the service provider can set the amount of years, and the ID card will simply answer with a yes or no. The pseudonym isn't created, but calculated from the ID's private key and the service provider's public key, so even a new card means new pseudonym, which makes it slightly less useful for login long term.
- M2Ys4U 4y ago
  >Others are outright creepy. You can't access medecine without verifying your ID? That locks lots of people out of access to healthcare (illegals, tourists, etc). Does it not make sense that prescription medication can only be picked up by somebody who has been prescribed that medication (or somebody who has been delegated that authority by the prescribee)? As long as there's an offline mechanism available for verification I don't see the problem here. >Age verification? So porn websites will store the real id of all their visitors (or alternatively a central EU age verification system will be notified every time you visit such a website)? Presenting a token verifying that one is over 18 is not the same thing as presenting one's entire identity so that the service can verify one is over 18. The way it could work is this: You try and access an age-restricted service (ARS). It returns a request for age verification including a unique ID. You then pass a hash of that request to the age verification service (AVS), and get back a token which is signed by the AVS. That token is then presented to the ARS, which validates that the signature and that the hash of their request are valid. Boom, you have just verified that you are over 18 without leaking your identity to the ARS and without leaking the ARS's identity to the AVS.
ekleraki 4y ago
I live in Denmark, I have an "easyID" (NemID), along with a social security number that allows me to connect to all government websites. The system allows people to use physical passcodes mailed to people, or send a push notification to their phone, to trigger the NemID application to approve or disapprove the entry. As others have mentioned, similar stuff exist in other countries as well. So to me, I'd rather have a single common, shared and opensource system for both Denmark, and all of EU.
Poppys 4y ago
The problem of digital identity theft/fraudulent identities exist very much, you can't get rid of crime by individuals or nations. So it seems that this would be a solution. Most EEA countries issue physical identity cards already, so a digital one would seem a logical step. Not that I don't disagree with the concerns about it.
silversmith 4y ago
You just have a very US centric view. Here's the situation in Latvia: Full, searchable (by government institutions) digital registry of citizens. Your income is being recorded for tax purposes. There's centralised data on what vehicles you own, and firearms are registered too. Medical data is also being centralised, to handle prescriptions digitally, and share test results between labs and doctors. Any criminal offences are centrally registered too. The information is there, and most likely being cross-referenced already. What this would add is a more comprehensive log of where proof of identity has been used. In my case, the last non-digital, non-already-trackable request to display proof of identity was last summer, when I was trying to buy a case of beer with a mask, sunglasses and a hat completely obscuring my face. Guess the police will now know I visit grocery stores. What's more, that's already been sort of centralised, with a single identity broker latvija.lv being run by the government, that then relies on other "blessed" identity sources such as banks or digital signature providers. The logs on who requested the identity verification and who got verified are surely there. If they cut the banks out of the loop, I see that as a net positive. As for me, I'm not overly bothered by this. I trust the government to not wilfully abuse the data far, far more than I trust any for-profit entity.
- RalfWausE 4y ago
  This is the problem: You have to trust the government. I, as a german trust Scholz only as far as i can throw him... and as i am a pencil necked hacker this isn't far
- maxwell 4y ago
  > You just have a very [U.S.] centric view. [...] I trust the [Latvian/EU] government to not wilfully [sic] abuse the data [sic] far, far more than I trust any for-profit entity. If unclear why no one in the U.S. trusts federal, state, or local governments: * The U.S. federal government now mostly acting in service of for-profit entities, due to legalized bribery of elected officials (Citizens United) and inadequate representation (the Judiciary Act of 1869 for the Supreme Court and the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 for the House). * History defeating the most powerful empire in world history, emerging as the first nation to ever overthrow a colonial oppressor. * U.S. law enforcement officers extrajudicially killing more Americans than mass shooters in 2019 and police departments across the country taking in billions USD every year in unconstitutionally seized assets. * More Black Americans in the "justice" system in the 2020s than were enslaved in the 1860s.
ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
You're being straight up realist here.
asdajksah2123 4y ago
It's surveillance to the extent any ID system is surveillance. This is a digital form of all the IDs you get from the state already. There are genuine concerns about the scale at which digital IDs can potentially be exploited and/or the scale of monitoring this can enable, but in functional societies and governments you can build laws and systems to mitigate such issues. The alternative are low quality ad hoc systems that offer convenience, but have no incentive for privacy and/or security. For example, consider the massive Experian hack in the US. A credit score is basically required if you want to be a functioning member of American society. And yet they barely got a slap on the wrist and continue with their pathetically poor security practices. And it's not like they (or any US entity, for that matter) will not make their data available to the government. In fact, with a government controlled DB the voters can have far more say on what the govt can do with that data, as opposed to Apple or Google owning that data (which is what's happenign in the US with Apple providing digital ID for states, and I'm sure Google will get into that as well), which becomes their private data and as a member of society you have no say on what can be done with that.
the_biot 4y ago
Of course it is. Note this line from TFA: Something the customer is (fingerprint, iris, face) Right there, trying to normalize the idea that the government needs our fingerprints, iris etc. And that ship has sailed, lots of laws getting passed that will require this from citizens.

Am I being cynic here or is this just another attempt at total surveillance? It solves a problem that does not exist, will likely be mandatory at some point and is executed by a defense company.

woodpanel 4y ago

I'm guessing more like a/multiple "recently privatized" ex-national telecommunications provider (ie blue chip company with the state as majority stakeholder). You know, "plausible deniability" and stuff… Edit: I stand corrected, with Thales writing this article, we can expect conglomorates such as Thales or Siemens to build this as well (corporations that due to their long standing national prominence are de-facto state-entities, although not de-jure).

threeseed 4y ago

I can't see much of a difference compared to a passport or driver's license. The quiet explosion in CCTV cameras across Europe is far more a threat than some unique identifier.

mdp2021 4y ago
> passport or driver's license Physical documents. This is an electronic system, with potential for issues as you (in this crowd) should suspect. > is far more a threat Which definitely concerns us in its own turn - who the daughter is dating will take its own slot.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
  The data on the document is just a snapshot of the data in electronic systems. These systems are used every single day when you use physical documents in healthcare or any other government-related scenarios to double-check on that physical document.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > The data on the document is just a snapshot of the data in electronic systems. These systems are used every single day The issue is not with the governmental database, taken for granted. It is with the consequences brought by the electronic system on the user side.

scrollaway 4y ago

Just because you don't see the problem it is solving doesn't mean the problem does not exist. Some context: I'm French, I live in Belgium. I have two e-IDs cards: one french, one belgian. When I need to identify myself, depending on the government I have to deal with, I have to use either my "FranceConnect" credentials, or my Belgian e-ID card. When using my Belgian eID, there is a government login called CSAM, but a lot of people here use a private company called "itsme" (https://www.itsme-id.com/ https://www.itsme-id.com/). ItsMe does not support Linux. CSAM does, but not every service that supports or even requires eID login here supports CSAM. FranceConnect is even more of a mess. French government has a plethora of online services, several with their own logins and not all support FranceConnect. Making a digital wallet won't increase surveillance... surveillance is already possible on all of this, quite easily so. What it will do is greatly simplify life for people dealing with these systems; especially for expats and new arrivals into a country, who might get stuck in the loop of "You need a bank account to get your ID" "You need an ID to open a bank account" Not to mention all the services that do their own shitty KYC and would be better served by using automated ID checking instead. Unless you think it's better and "more private" to email a photocopy of your ID and passport to somebody who will forward it three times, save it on their computer, and share it on Slack with the tech team because there's a problem with their shitty KYC system.

woodpanel 4y ago
> Making a digital wallet won't increase surveillance... surveillance is already possible on all of this, Sure, because a little minority of people has "the burden" of managing multiple IDs, lets tear down one firewall between citizenry and big-brother for the rest of us.
- malermeister 4y ago
  What's the "firewall" in this case? eIDs already exist all over the place, as demonstrated in parent. They also clearly have their use, even though they are currently frequently broken. Is the brokenness the firewall?
  - 4y ago

snypox 4y ago

It solves on problem for me. Since the introduction of Apple Pay I hate taking my wallet anywhere and 95% of the time I don’t. But my ID and driver’s license is in there and it’s needed sometimes. This gets me closer to the goal. Let’s say, travelling to a different country without a wallet would be amazing to me.

kabes 4y ago

It does solve a problem that exists. In fact the use cases are listed in the article: filing tax reports, opening/accessing bank accounts, etc. Basically the stuff where in the offline world you would've needed to show your ID. However, many (all?) EU members already have developed their own national system. So this tries to unionize those systems so dealing with other member nations becomes easier. Today I often have to mail a bunch of documents if I want to prove my business ownership to foreign companies.

TurkishPoptart 4y ago
Doesn't Estonia have its own E-Estonia X-road system that already does these things, using cryptography for verification and non-repudiation? So why do we need this newer, more expensive, dystopian stuff made by some private company? How do I vote against this? Oh wait, it's the EU...so I can't.
sathishmanohar 4y ago
and eventually those tax reports and credit ratings will be tied to super market checkout systems. So governments can pick and choose which tax payers can eat what. Any data that is aggregated is open to abuse by the aggregator and it will be definitely abused if the aggregator is a government body.
- malermeister 4y ago
  I'd much rather have my government have info about me than Facebook. Even in your contrived dystopia, I'd rather have a democratic government be the Big Brother than some unelected tech CEO.
  - closewith 4y ago
    That's a false dichotomy. We can create a world where our right to privacy is respected by both governments and the private sector.
    - 4y ago

mordae 4y ago

> Am I being cynic here or is this just another attempt at total surveillance? I don't think so. The idea is to make the wallet offline. > It solves a problem that does not exist, I does exist. Automatically checking identity is hard. Some counties apparently issued certificates to their citizens and enabled them being verified by anyone, simplifying several online businesses patterns. > will likely be mandatory at some point More like fast lane. But eventually (30 years) probably yes. > and is executed by a defense company. Every country is responsible for their own part. There are going to be ETSI standards for interoperability. The actual trouble here is that (at least in my country) the officials responsible believe that rooted phone is higher security risk than automatic updates from Chinese government.

closewith 4y ago
> Automatically checking identity is hard. This seems like a feature, not a bug.
- stubish 4y ago
  Every single non-cash transaction you make every single day needs to check your identity. Currently it is outsourced to banks, multinationals like visa, thousands of different government departments providing trusted docs (usually a few different ones per country). And a lot of fraud happens because we do a bad job at it. Or for-profits, doing 'good enough' where 'better' isn't profitable, because they get to pass on the trauma of identity theft to the victims.

radicalbyte 4y ago

I'm involved in a group who come into contact with this. It's not about surveillance, it's about providing European governments, European economy and citizens with electronic ID in all situations without having to rely on Google/Apple/Facebook. So you can have a secure way to login to websites, with many personas, without having to share your GAF (and thus be tracked by GAF / share GAF data with yet another party). Thales on the other hand are not what I would describe as a good actor but rather one of the "usual suspects".

closewith 4y ago
Providing governments with a de facto mandatory electronic ID for every citizen is inherently providing the means to surveil, though. I also wonder how this will be regarded in countries like Ireland, which doesn't have a national ID card and where a recent attempt to make a similar digital ID system mandatory was ruled unlawful (PSC/MyGovID).
- slartibardfast0 4y ago
  Ireland can't really do a national id scheme without mutual agreement with the UK due to the common travel area & mutual residence rights (including voting at parliamentary level upon taking residence) that are dealt with in an ad-hoc manner for many reasons. due to this, Ireland has default opt-out on justice & home affairs issues. however, as an EU citizen, I can see immediate advantages to a cautiously administered digital id. as it is, many states within the EU demand a national tax id on registration for services as simple as bike rental, such a digital id would presumably supersede such nonsense and help further the single market everyone is working towards.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  The regulation will have to make that illegal - there are several countries who would block the regulation it if it wasn't. So the situation will be better for us than today - there will be more options providing the ID (and wallets), including highly privacy-preserving tech based on modern encryption techniques. That will make it much harder to be tracked by commercial players and much harder to be tracked legally by governments. For the blackhat / illegal security agencies: you might make it a little harder because the US-compromised companies (FAANG + MS) aren't (always) involved.

nix23 4y ago

>just another attempt at total surveillance? Well yes, have you seen what europol can do now? Safe and analyze data even from unsuspected people. German: https://www.heise.de/news/Europols-Mandat-zur-Massenueberwachung-tritt-in-Kraft-7157752.html https://www.heise.de/news/Europols-Mandat-zur-Massenueberwac...

cm2187 4y ago

Most of the examples mentioned in the article already require your identity (opening bank account, tax return, etc). Others are outright creepy. You can't access medecine without verifying your ID? That locks lots of people out of access to healthcare (illegals, tourists, etc). Age verification? So porn websites will store the real id of all their visitors (or alternatively a central EU age verification system will be notified every time you visit such a website)? In France for instance it is illegal to identify people by their social security number in a system (at least it was 20 years ago). That's a safeguard to prevent it from making it too easy to correlate an identity across many systems. This ID scheme will go around that. To be honest I think that law was passed at a time where surveillance was still considered evil. I think governements of most liberal democracies today are actually entertaining stasi-style surveillance as a greater good.

wewxjfq 4y ago
Age verification already works with the current digital IDs and it's made in a way that doesn't leak your personal data. In general you get to see what personal data is being requested before you agree to transmit it. The IDs can also create pseudonyms, so different systems don't know that you are the same person. I opted out of the digital functions of my ID, but I plan to have them activated, because it's better than video identification or uploading scans of my documents. That being said, I hope that only serious processes will adopt this.
- zeeZ 4y ago
  In the context of German ID cards, this is mostly correct. For age verification requests, the service provider can set the amount of years, and the ID card will simply answer with a yes or no. The pseudonym isn't created, but calculated from the ID's private key and the service provider's public key, so even a new card means new pseudonym, which makes it slightly less useful for login long term.
M2Ys4U 4y ago
>Others are outright creepy. You can't access medecine without verifying your ID? That locks lots of people out of access to healthcare (illegals, tourists, etc). Does it not make sense that prescription medication can only be picked up by somebody who has been prescribed that medication (or somebody who has been delegated that authority by the prescribee)? As long as there's an offline mechanism available for verification I don't see the problem here. >Age verification? So porn websites will store the real id of all their visitors (or alternatively a central EU age verification system will be notified every time you visit such a website)? Presenting a token verifying that one is over 18 is not the same thing as presenting one's entire identity so that the service can verify one is over 18. The way it could work is this: You try and access an age-restricted service (ARS). It returns a request for age verification including a unique ID. You then pass a hash of that request to the age verification service (AVS), and get back a token which is signed by the AVS. That token is then presented to the ARS, which validates that the signature and that the hash of their request are valid. Boom, you have just verified that you are over 18 without leaking your identity to the ARS and without leaking the ARS's identity to the AVS.

ekleraki 4y ago

I live in Denmark, I have an "easyID" (NemID), along with a social security number that allows me to connect to all government websites. The system allows people to use physical passcodes mailed to people, or send a push notification to their phone, to trigger the NemID application to approve or disapprove the entry. As others have mentioned, similar stuff exist in other countries as well. So to me, I'd rather have a single common, shared and opensource system for both Denmark, and all of EU.

Poppys 4y ago

The problem of digital identity theft/fraudulent identities exist very much, you can't get rid of crime by individuals or nations. So it seems that this would be a solution. Most EEA countries issue physical identity cards already, so a digital one would seem a logical step. Not that I don't disagree with the concerns about it.

silversmith 4y ago

You just have a very US centric view. Here's the situation in Latvia: Full, searchable (by government institutions) digital registry of citizens. Your income is being recorded for tax purposes. There's centralised data on what vehicles you own, and firearms are registered too. Medical data is also being centralised, to handle prescriptions digitally, and share test results between labs and doctors. Any criminal offences are centrally registered too. The information is there, and most likely being cross-referenced already. What this would add is a more comprehensive log of where proof of identity has been used. In my case, the last non-digital, non-already-trackable request to display proof of identity was last summer, when I was trying to buy a case of beer with a mask, sunglasses and a hat completely obscuring my face. Guess the police will now know I visit grocery stores. What's more, that's already been sort of centralised, with a single identity broker latvija.lv being run by the government, that then relies on other "blessed" identity sources such as banks or digital signature providers. The logs on who requested the identity verification and who got verified are surely there. If they cut the banks out of the loop, I see that as a net positive. As for me, I'm not overly bothered by this. I trust the government to not wilfully abuse the data far, far more than I trust any for-profit entity.

RalfWausE 4y ago
This is the problem: You have to trust the government. I, as a german trust Scholz only as far as i can throw him... and as i am a pencil necked hacker this isn't far
maxwell 4y ago
> You just have a very [U.S.] centric view. [...] I trust the [Latvian/EU] government to not wilfully [sic] abuse the data [sic] far, far more than I trust any for-profit entity. If unclear why no one in the U.S. trusts federal, state, or local governments: * The U.S. federal government now mostly acting in service of for-profit entities, due to legalized bribery of elected officials (Citizens United) and inadequate representation (the Judiciary Act of 1869 for the Supreme Court and the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 for the House). * History defeating the most powerful empire in world history, emerging as the first nation to ever overthrow a colonial oppressor. * U.S. law enforcement officers extrajudicially killing more Americans than mass shooters in 2019 and police departments across the country taking in billions USD every year in unconstitutionally seized assets. * More Black Americans in the "justice" system in the 2020s than were enslaved in the 1860s.

ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago

You're being straight up realist here.

asdajksah2123 4y ago

It's surveillance to the extent any ID system is surveillance. This is a digital form of all the IDs you get from the state already. There are genuine concerns about the scale at which digital IDs can potentially be exploited and/or the scale of monitoring this can enable, but in functional societies and governments you can build laws and systems to mitigate such issues. The alternative are low quality ad hoc systems that offer convenience, but have no incentive for privacy and/or security. For example, consider the massive Experian hack in the US. A credit score is basically required if you want to be a functioning member of American society. And yet they barely got a slap on the wrist and continue with their pathetically poor security practices. And it's not like they (or any US entity, for that matter) will not make their data available to the government. In fact, with a government controlled DB the voters can have far more say on what the govt can do with that data, as opposed to Apple or Google owning that data (which is what's happenign in the US with Apple providing digital ID for states, and I'm sure Google will get into that as well), which becomes their private data and as a member of society you have no say on what can be done with that.

the_biot 4y ago

Of course it is. Note this line from TFA: Something the customer is (fingerprint, iris, face) Right there, trying to normalize the idea that the government needs our fingerprints, iris etc. And that ship has sailed, lots of laws getting passed that will require this from citizens.