11 ms·

The rise of biodigital surveillance

• Kon-Peki 4y ago
  > The stated mission of ID2020 is to provide digital identities for all people worldwide by 2030 I'm guessing the stated mission has been changed once or twice since it was founded.
  • beckingz 4y ago
    Sounds like they were years ahead of their time.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• michaelmcdonald 4y ago
  > This may at first glance sound sensible. But consider: If an impoverished family doesn’t accept the health NGO’s preferred interventions for its children, these children may not be provided any other opportunity to establish a “legal, broadly recognized identity” necessary to access things like primary school. In other words, you are literally nobody until you are vaccinated. Author is making quite a leap that the _only_ way to receive a digital ID is to get vaccinated. If a program like this ever does take off you will see alternative methods of identification acquisition. Case in point: I don't need a driver's license to get a state issued ID. Functionally they are the same in terms of proving I am who I say I am, but one affords additional benefits of stating I can drive.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    The way it works today is they you either get the school vaccinations or a sometimes limited exception, otherwise you don't get to attend. It seems like they're just putting a layer on top of this.
    • t0bia_s 4y ago
      Since primary school is mandatory in my country, they have to accept all kids, with or without vaccination. Kindergarten aren't mandatory, so it is up to them if they accept unvaccinated kids or not. There are exceptions for kids that cannot be vaccinated because of medical reasons which is argument for those parents who does not want to vaccine their kids and still want get them to kindergarten regardless their health condition.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        Primary and secondary school is mandatory here too. They won't let you go without shots, or an exception (medical, or in some states a religious/belief one). The alternative is that you're home schooled (even private schools are required to mandate the shots).
        • t0bia_s 4y ago
          How mandatory is primary school when it require medical intervention? Isn't education unconditional right?
          • giantg2 4y ago
            It's legally mandatory. That's why they'd be required to home school (standards are set by the state), or face charges.
• treetoppin 4y ago
  Making things legible to the state is one of the ever going projects of any state. So while I think it’s important to make sure that refusal to participate in one of these projects doesn’t preclude you from still receiving the services of the state, it’s also isn’t surprising that the state wants to make its constituents more legible to itself. The balance falls in figuring out how to firewall these different functions to prevent certain kinds of identity from making it so you can’t receive the services that are the whole reason why you have a state.
  • RandomLensman 4y ago
    Blanket refusal to get an ID card or passport will get you into trouble in some countries as a citizen (e.g., Germany). Possible fines etc. aside, establishing your ID in a lot of situations will get quite difficult.
    • xfitm3 4y ago
      Tell that to Americans who are against having an ID to vote
      • xenophonf 4y ago
        I don't see any value in voter ID since in-person voter fraud is exceedingly rare. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/10-voter-fraud-lies-debunked https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/10-v... In practice, voter ID schemes are used to disenfranchise citizens. https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/vote-suppression/voter-id https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-c...
        • Test0129 4y ago
          The greater point, I think, is that everywhere else in American where I deal with the government I am required to present some form of ID. They even give you a list of a dozen or more valid IDs you can use. However, arguably the most important interface with the government, voting is a place where I don't even have to validate I am who I say I am. Seems strange to me.
• rekabis 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • swader999 4y ago
    You can't get herd immunity from vaccination with a virus like corona. This was known from the beginning. It mutates too fast. You end up training your immune system for an extinct variant and it responds poorly when presented with the latest variant. Herd immunity works great for measles and polio, the binding mechanism really doesn't survive mutations well for these virus. And ethically, you are proposing these walled societies where children risk their health with poorly tested treatments to save the older generation? I find that abhorrent.
    • Bellamy 4y ago
      Where we're you when all the experts and politicians were talking (some still are) about herd immunity in beating corona?
      • swader999 4y ago
        Censored lol.
    • rekabis 4y ago
      > You can't get herd immunity from vaccination with a virus like corona. This was known from the beginning. It mutates too fast. There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more. Unfortunately, politics and antivaxx disinformation got in the way of that. And people continued to die in droves due to selfishness and lies.
      • ISL 4y ago
        Agreed, though it would have been necessary to deploy the vaccines globally, especially in the least-wealthy parts of the world. In the case of Omicron, there's a good chance that the vaccines would have needed to reach a community in Botswana ahead of the initiation of the chronic infection that may have produced BA.1, BA.2, etc. First-world extensive deployments would have killed off the first-world propagation of variants through Delta in short order, but everything changed with Omicron.
• TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  EU is issuing biometric passports where are loaded your fingerprints and some EU states started to issue biometric citizen IDs, where are fingerprints stored too. So it is kind of already going on? Additionally citizen IDs are nothing new, at least in Eastern Europe, where you will get one when you reach 15 years of age.
  • pfortuny 4y ago
    In Spain you get your fingerprints printed when receiving the (essentially compulsory) ID card… And this is seens as “good” and “normal”… Sigh.
  • franga2000 4y ago
    Aren't those stored on the card/passport, not in any central database? They already have your photo printed on them (as well as stored digitally in some cases). I don't really see a difference between a fingerprint reader comparing against the print stored in the ID card and a camera comparing your face to the photo printed on it. Of course there is the case of a rogue terminal surreptitiously saving your fingerprint or photo, but even before we had automated facial recognition at border crossings, you'd still have to hand in your passport to be scanned (to read the MRZ) and stamped, so a rogue terminal could have been saving photos all along.
    • TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      On passport, but also in the database of the department. Thing is that my country government administration sucks and those databases are not shared, so when you will get citizen ID with your fingerprints and photo, then you will go to get your driving license, you will need to get them photo again, because internal affairs department and traffic department does not talk to each other despite the fact, that they have offices in same building.
      • franga2000 4y ago
        Ok yeah, that horrible. In Slovenia, your fingerprints (for biometric passports) are sent along with the print order to the manufacturing facility and then deleted. For all photo IDs (passport, ID card, driver's license, weapon permit), your photo is either scanned and sent along with the order or uploaded to a database that deletes it after 2 weeks. Nothing is ever stored permanently or accessible by anyone other than the people and systems directly involved in getting your document made. * * That is, of course, what the law says. I have no reason to believe "the government" is breaking that law, but no way to verify either. It would probably be discovered and leaked very quickly if they were though.
• chatterhead 4y ago
  "China is using all the means available to an authoritarian state to reach its 5‐year R&D plan to make the biotechnology sector 5% of its GDP by 2020." - Tara O'Toole statement to Senate subcommittee 2019 Social Credit Systems are just lakes of aggregated data accessible by a government. From your health to how you choose you will end up a model in a prediction system.
  • IYasha 4y ago
    System detected you bought a toy bear System detected you bought yellow paint System predicts you will spend 1 year in prison
• Bakary 4y ago
  One aspect I find interesting about HN is that most of the posters there are involved in adtech, data-gathering, FAANGs, or adjacent businesses, whilst reaping very high rewards for their troubles. At the same time, they have an enduring interest in adblocking, freedom, liberal or libertarian values and so on. This creates a situation where their economic wellbeing and working life is directly aimed towards enforcing surveillance capitalism and authoriarian tools, while at the same time they receive enough resources to avoid the brunt of the consequences, and their mental landscape deals with the cognitive dissonance to maintain an identity of progressiveness. It directly mirrors the feudal system with a tiny portion of the population living in unimaginable luxury and employing another much larger but still small portion overall to keep the hierarchy running. In other words, billionaires supported by well-compensated SWE vassals who devise ever more sophisticated tools to extract value and data-powered obedience through surveillance from regular workers.
  • whoooooo123 4y ago
    Do "most" posters at HN work at FAANG or in adtech? There's a lot of those people here for sure, but I can't believe they're anything close to the majority.
    • Bakary 4y ago
      I don't have actual stats of course but intuitively if you tally: - All the FAANG/FAANG suppliers - All startups or established projects that involve data gathering, advertising, SEO, skinner boxes, dopamine response, parasocial relationship manipulation, optimizing time spent on controlled platforms and products - All projects that facilitate the above as suppliers or second-order businesses - All gig economy/surveilled/taylorized work facilitators - All coding work that involves ranking and surveilling people for life altering services such as loans, insurance, healthcare - All coding work done to optimize the wealth of the noble class (themselves the main beneficiaries of surveillance) ...there's probably not much left. Even if you maintain a strict definition and include only direct adtech shenanigans I wouldn't be surprised if that were a huge number in and of itself.
      • 4y ago
• overthemoon 4y ago
  Just talking about the US here, but what about our current identification systems are so deficient that we need this?
  • cr4nberry 4y ago
    SSNs are incredibly insecure (and also used in a way they were never intended). I don't think we need biometrics to replace them, but if there's a push to replace them, people will likely push for biometrics as hard as possible
• jscipione 4y ago
  The 4th Amendment right to privacy has been so badly violated by the US Federal Government and TSA that the Constitution is no longer valid - the contract is beyond broken, the US government has descended into absolute dictatorship and it is the duty of all Americans to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    >The 4th Amendment right to privacy has been so badly violated by the US Federal Government and TSA that the Constitution is no longer valid Without the constitution, would you be holding all the cards or would the Army?
    • jscipione 4y ago
      We have a Constitutional Convention, enact a new Constitution and a new Capital, then release all the dirty secrets from the old (current) government similar to how documents were released in the early 1990’s when the Soviet Union fell apart. The armed services, being part of the old government would lose their authority along with the rest. This assumes a peaceful transition of power, if violence is used instead all bets are off.
      • such12 4y ago
        > This assumes a peaceful transition of power, if violence is used instead all bets are off. You expect the US government to simply step down?
        • jscipione 4y ago
          Civil disobedience is a serious threat to the power of the US government. 19 states out of 34 states have already committed to the convention of states. The US Federal government knows all too well how to deal with violence but they don’t know how to handle peaceful mass non-compliance.
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  It's a mistake to use biometrics for authentication. Perhaps as weak identification it's acceptable. It's a username, not a password. Because it's public, shared (you leave bits of bioinformation everywhere you go) and not deliberately changeable. A password is none of those things.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• blurbleblurble 4y ago
  I hope people realize this includes things like gait and gesture recognition and RF fingerprinting across multiple RF spectrums.
• motohagiography 4y ago
  There is nothing friendly or helpful or optimistic about digital identity schemes, they are domestic passports for movement, and a pervasive, specific and ongoing threat against you as an individual for giving the appearance of non-compliance, or even a lack of enthusiasm for compliance. It's dominion. Honestly, a digital ID scheme is what the next global, multi year or even decade long land war will be fought over. I know we have a convention about avoiding discussions of violence, but digital ID, just like the ID schemes of early 20th c Europe and Russia, is the thing that you either nip in the bud in the present, or the number of lives that will be lost over it just grows every single day as the cancer of these systems establishes itself in our societies. There is zero hyperbole in this. I've worked on digital identity solutions, and fundamentally, they are not a consumer product anybody actually wants because their use cases are all about enforcing rules against the identity subject. The only way the tech survives is it must be mandated, and then it's a question of whose problem does it solve? The only people that a global digital identity solves a problem for are the people administering it, literally against the whole world. The survivors will ask, "how did it all happen so fast, what were the warnings?" and this obscure comment will be the hunger stone and harbinger. I'm literally saying millions of people will die, partially because of my inability to be persuasive, but mostly because of your misunderstanding of what this technology does and of what it is the effect.
  • hooverd 4y ago
    Not that I'm in favor of it, but India, with its ~1.3 billion pop and Aadhaar hasn't fallen over just yet.
    • motohagiography 4y ago
      Arguably, the caste system maintains social order in India, and so digital ID for castes who are educated to be treated poorly isn't a change. The change would be for westernized countries where everyone used to be taught they have freedom and human dignity.
  • mistrial9 4y ago
    strong agree -- federated Identity is still possible, and political speech with anonymity too
• hitpointdrew 4y ago
  Yeah, hard pass.