7 ms·

Germany was quite advanced when it came to technology but then the drive to make more of it somehow stopped. It has always been incredibly sad to me that the G

by foepys 4y ago

Germany was quite advanced when it came to technology but then the drive to make more of it somehow stopped. It has always been incredibly sad to me that the German ID card (Personalausweis) has an RFID chip inside with trust zones, certificates, authorization features, and much more and just never had been used. Like at all except for getting cigarettes at vending machines. 12 years after the first RFID Personalausweis had been issued it is only possible to register your car in some cities. Maybe there are other minor uses but it's negligible. It's a very cool technology with a certificate authority and cryptographically secured claims for various things (proving you are over 18 without revealing your DOB, only giving out the name and address, authenticating as a German citizen, pseudonymity with separate identities for each service you use etc.). All functionality is also available for use over the internet. The German Wikipedia has a good overview: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalausweis_(Deutschland)#Der_elektronische_Personalausweis_(nPA) https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalausweis_(Deutschland...

hatenberg 4y ago
25 years of intentionally slowing down digitalization to protect local SMEs (which make 70-80% of the economy) against US tech companies leveraging economies of scale. Yes there’s plenty corruption and disastrous bets (ISDN…), but let’s not pretend the situation isn’t intentionally created.
jlelse 4y ago
You can use the "Online-Personalausweis" for quite some things actually. For example to authenticate at banks, so you don't have to do Video-Ident. Or to do taxes etc. I wrote a post about it earlier this year: https://b.jlel.se/s/59c https://b.jlel.se/s/59c
- derac 4y ago
  I don't speak german, but by video identification do you mean the system in which you turn in the webcam and it checks your face? If so, that is highly vulnerable to real time face swapping attacks (and possibly just recorded webcam footage). I'm sure you're aware, but these systems need to change.
  - moooo99 4y ago
    For banking a fairly well known identification provider is "Postident", a service offered by Deutsche Post. They offer plenty of ways to actually authenticate. The classic one is that you receive a voucher, go to a post shop, the employee there checks your ID and prints you a verification code (iirc). They also added video calls for identification and from my experience, it seems as if they are aware of the potential security implications. They ask you a bunch of questions and require you to do different things (for example hold your ID card right in front of your face, cover one side of your face, etc) presumably to counter this attack vector. The smoothest way is to use the ID card integration. With that, assuming your ID is already set up for the online authentication, the whole kyc process for a new bank account is done within two minutes. Unfortunately it seems like some banks still disable this option, at least I did recently open an account and did not have this option for use with postident.
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      > They ask you a bunch of questions and require you to do different things (for example hold your ID card right in front of your face, cover one side of your face, etc) presumably to counter this attack vector. Give them a little while and the AI will be able to do all that so you can finally prove to the government that you are indeed a panda bear.
  - junon 4y ago
    Nah it's a web call where they check your passport for authenticity and identity in real time with a real human in order to authorize a new bank account etc.
- tchalla 4y ago
  One of the links seems to be broken > Das Gesetz hat sogar eine eigene Website mit einem Dashboard,
bradhe 4y ago
I heard something yesterday about how you can authenticate digitally for tax documents using the NFC chip in your Personalausweis! You just have to download some app. But yes, in general, we’re SO CLOSE…then you have to go do Anmeldung with a paper form in person
- Dagonfly 4y ago
  I do all my tax return stuff online with my Personalausweis. Once you got all your PINs and access codes it's quite seamless actually. You can even pair your phone with your PC and use the phone's NFC reader to read the ID-card. That stuff honestly improved quite a bit in the recent years. Most of these services are just not advertised or integrated enough so far.
moooo99 4y ago
Its hilarious. I recently moved and wanted to update the registration info for my car. My city boasts about having an "online self service for anything you'd usually need" (sad enough that this alone is a rare achievement), so naive me decided to give it a try. I successfully registered and wanted to update the info on my car, but got stopped by a disclaimer saying "if you want to do this online with your eID, you need to attach a picture of your ID to the form"?!. I burst out laughing, wondering what the point of this eID even is. And I still haven't updated my info
lzauz 4y ago
- znpy 4y ago
  I wouldn’t call such people mentally invalid. However, as an Italian, i understand your feelings. Public administration has always been the land of bureaucratic people that want to see sheets of paper, stamps and signatures. They’re almost often unfamiliar with technology and they are mostly unwilling to change their workload. The real problem if very often that upper management is often also old and unfamiliar with technology too, hence incapable of understanding the value that technology could bring hence unwilling to push its adoption.
  - lzauz 4y ago
    You are being too benevolent. You think progress in bureaucracy is being resisted because those people are "old and unfamiliar", but they actively resist it because their paycheck depends on it. They know if they get fired they are completely useless in the job market.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    The tolerance for high salaries in government is basically non-existant. People throw fits in my region about teachers with 30 years experience and the maximum scale making just over $100k/year Canadian (just over $70k/USD). So you can imagine what it's like to try and hire senior developers (five years experience) at around $90k when top of the market is quadruple that and a large number of companies pay double that. The end result is they hire from the bottom 25% of developers, the bottom 25% of product managers and the bottom 25% of managers. Add to that a large dysfunctional bureaucracy and they are lucky if they get people 10% as productive as in competing companies. It's a colossal problem because government routinely fails at building technology and then outsources it at extreme cost. That outsourcing isn't always successful either in part because the requirements hinge on those same Product Managers that government can hire on extremely restricted budgets.
leonry 4y ago
A couple of years ago, I would have concurred. But for some time already you have the possibility to use the e-ID through Postident (https://www.deutschepost.de/de/p/postident/privatkunden/identifikation-mit-eid.html https://www.deutschepost.de/de/p/postident/privatkunden/iden...) which is kind of well integrated in many businesses. Moreover you have private / corporate solutions like Verimi (https://verimi.de/ https://verimi.de/) that incorporate functionalities of the e-ID. There is even an alternative (https://www.openecard.org/startseite/ https://www.openecard.org/startseite/) to the official app. (EDIT: The alternative is open-source, but so is the official app. Removed adjective.) I really like the development that has gone into the e-ID. They even have thought out a safe way to update your PIN (https://www.pin-ruecksetzbrief-bestellen.de/ https://www.pin-ruecksetzbrief-bestellen.de/)! The biggest drawback of all is the lack of any marketing, IMHO.
- dmacvicar 4y ago
  The official app is already open-source: https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp2 https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp2
  - leonry 4y ago
    True, that wasn't well formulated.
woah 4y ago
Makes a lot of sense with German culture IMO. There's a culture of doing your job very well, but not much of a culture of thinking outside of the box or shaking things up. Some Herr Doktor probably followed all the best practices to implement "trust zones, certificates, authorization features, and much more" in the ID, doing their job really well. But actually changing the processes to use those features is not anyone's job, and might actually eliminate a lot of jobs, so it never happened.
- numpad0 4y ago
  I think modern political criticisms might be too dismissive of inefficient bureaucratic developments, or we might be taking criticisms too seriously. They might be slow, complicated, budgeted terribly, unbelievably incompetent by standards of typical for-profit mega corporation, but a lot of those projects work at first try and works for decades, in the end. SLS capsule came back in one piece on first try. That German ID system probably works too. And that’s great.
  - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    It is good this project is failing. Such a thing will never fly in the US. Both the left and right will rightfully or wrongfully oppose it for different reasons. Edit: E.g. see the left opposing voter ids in the US.
    - romwell 4y ago
      >Edit: E.g. see the left opposing voter ids in the US. FYI, the left wasn't opposing voter IDs. The left was opposing Voter ID laws, which required a voter to have an ID, while selectively providing these IDs to the population. That's a uniquely American problem. We wouldn't have an issue with a Voter ID law if everyone was guaranteed to have a state ID, regardless of where they live, whether they have a car or not, and whether they have money to pay for it (it should be free).
      - snowpid 4y ago
Lanz 4y ago
It's almost as if the spirit of the people was broken as Germany drifted more and more leftward.
- ln_00 4y ago
  wow. You won the award of the most stupid comment on this post.
  - dang 4y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- alexseman 4y ago
- dang 4y ago
  Oh dear. Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. It's predictable, nasty, and not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Zagill 4y ago
  Yeah, they should try going to the right again. The people were very spirited last time
kune 4y ago
I actually use my German ID card to communicate with the Elster service of the German tax offices. My old USB signing stick would need to be replaced next year, but using my ID card was the cheaper option.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  You can also generate a certificate. Registering it requires receiving a letter by snail mail and it expires every X years (5 maybe?), but otherwise it's just like your certificate for your server you use to SSH in.
  - lakomen 4y ago
    2 years
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      3 years. I’m back at my computer and checked, my certificates were 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022
tpm 4y ago
Many more applications will come in coming years. They are being implemented right now, I think this was sped up by some law that municipalities have to provide those services online by 2026? Not sure. Anyway there is a huge backlog and not enough programmers but one way or another this has to be done.
GTP 4y ago
In The Netherlands, they are implementing a thing which gives the same advantages (i.e. disclose some attributes about yourself without disclosing unneeded data), but uses different technologies. It's called IRMA, you can find an overview here [1]. It can be combined with other applications to do cool stuff, e.g. with PostGuard [2] you can use identity-based encryption to be able to send an encrypted email to someone, but without the need to know their public key in advance, nor having to authenticate it. The drawback is that you have to trust a central server and a third party identity provider. [1] https://irma.app/ https://irma.app/ [2] https://postguard.eu/ https://postguard.eu/
- catiopatio 4y ago
  From the website: > With IRMA it is easy to log in and make yourself known, by disclosing only relevant attributes of yourself. For instance, in order to watch a certain movie online, you prove that you are older than 16, and nothing else. That’s not “cool stuff”.
  - bmn__ 4y ago
    You present the conclusion only. Please share the train of thoughts that made you arrive at it, because it is not obvious.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      It’s not cool that content would be restricted to people that can prove they are older than 16. It requires very little imagination to see how this could be extended to restrict content to people that have a yellow star on their clothes.
      - kergonath 4y ago
        This does not follow, in the same way that the existence of the police does not imply a slide towards a police state. The slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy. Besides, at least around here they already ask for an ID if you look young enough, for some movies. This is not enabled by new technologies.
sandos 4y ago
Its fascinating what EU can accomplish, but in my mind drivers licenses and "national IDs" (that are usable when travelling in EU) should be merged and unified over the union. Imagine how much simpler things would be! And this tech used in Germany sounds like a very nice base for it. I mean I would also make them passports but I think that is impossible.
- joeschmopoe 4y ago
  Lots of people don't have a license but do move around and across EU borders a lot. The IDs are actually heavily unified nowadays https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_the_European_Economic_Area#New_European_Union_standards_from_2019 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_t...
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I would imagine that different countries might had slightly different traffic laws or acceptable risk levels, so might want to have their own licensing schemes. Maybe the could have a unified form-factor that gets stamped by the individual countries though.
  - joeschmopoe 4y ago
    They do, all IDs are in ID-1 form factor, stamped by the countries and the EU [1]. It's the same for driver's licenses [2], they are accepted in all EU member states and basically look exactly the same, just in different languages and show a different flag. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_the_European_Economic_Area#New_European_Union_standards_from_2019 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_t... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_driving_licence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_driving_licence
- bobbruno 4y ago
  This may be difficult for an American to understand, but a driver's license is not a core document, and many people may not have it. In most places it'd not come to mind in a discussion about digital ID.
roenxi 4y ago
The scars of WWII have well and truly healed if people are comfortable with this technology. The 1900s accrued a lot of experience with where this will go. Usually I'll argue for market efficiency over other concerns; but in this case the Europeans are on to something with the GDPR. The role of government is to make this sort of personalised identification hard - not to enable it. The end game is going to be hard times and mass discrimination against minorities.
stkdump 4y ago
I use my Personalausweis to submit tax stuff, to get the current status of the government pension fund (I can know at any time, not just once per year how many Rentenpunkte I have) and to submit local requests for my city (for example changes for the garbage collection service). My phone serves as the card reader using NFC. It works like a charm.
PYTHONDJANGO 4y ago
Unfortunately still many people working in tec jobs do not understand that putting an ID on an official governmental document that you need to carry is effectively the same like a tattoo with a number on your arm. Despite Germans have made bad experiences with that, the idea survived the 3rd Reich. The idea that as a human being you need "governmental documents" to identify is an authoritarian core value that is fundamentally against individual freedom. Jews were forced to always carry their "Kennkarte" with them. Please do not tell me about positive use cases that are based on the naive idea that "the government is the good guys". When electronic IDs are not rolled back everywhere then democracy and individual freedom will be lost for a very long time.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  We should pay vast quantities to microsoft or google do it, they can be trusted ... right

by foepys 4y ago

hatenberg 4y ago

25 years of intentionally slowing down digitalization to protect local SMEs (which make 70-80% of the economy) against US tech companies leveraging economies of scale. Yes there’s plenty corruption and disastrous bets (ISDN…), but let’s not pretend the situation isn’t intentionally created.

jlelse 4y ago

You can use the "Online-Personalausweis" for quite some things actually. For example to authenticate at banks, so you don't have to do Video-Ident. Or to do taxes etc. I wrote a post about it earlier this year: https://b.jlel.se/s/59c https://b.jlel.se/s/59c

derac 4y ago
I don't speak german, but by video identification do you mean the system in which you turn in the webcam and it checks your face? If so, that is highly vulnerable to real time face swapping attacks (and possibly just recorded webcam footage). I'm sure you're aware, but these systems need to change.
- moooo99 4y ago
  For banking a fairly well known identification provider is "Postident", a service offered by Deutsche Post. They offer plenty of ways to actually authenticate. The classic one is that you receive a voucher, go to a post shop, the employee there checks your ID and prints you a verification code (iirc). They also added video calls for identification and from my experience, it seems as if they are aware of the potential security implications. They ask you a bunch of questions and require you to do different things (for example hold your ID card right in front of your face, cover one side of your face, etc) presumably to counter this attack vector. The smoothest way is to use the ID card integration. With that, assuming your ID is already set up for the online authentication, the whole kyc process for a new bank account is done within two minutes. Unfortunately it seems like some banks still disable this option, at least I did recently open an account and did not have this option for use with postident.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    > They ask you a bunch of questions and require you to do different things (for example hold your ID card right in front of your face, cover one side of your face, etc) presumably to counter this attack vector. Give them a little while and the AI will be able to do all that so you can finally prove to the government that you are indeed a panda bear.
- junon 4y ago
  Nah it's a web call where they check your passport for authenticity and identity in real time with a real human in order to authorize a new bank account etc.
tchalla 4y ago
One of the links seems to be broken > Das Gesetz hat sogar eine eigene Website mit einem Dashboard,

bradhe 4y ago

I heard something yesterday about how you can authenticate digitally for tax documents using the NFC chip in your Personalausweis! You just have to download some app. But yes, in general, we’re SO CLOSE…then you have to go do Anmeldung with a paper form in person

Dagonfly 4y ago
I do all my tax return stuff online with my Personalausweis. Once you got all your PINs and access codes it's quite seamless actually. You can even pair your phone with your PC and use the phone's NFC reader to read the ID-card. That stuff honestly improved quite a bit in the recent years. Most of these services are just not advertised or integrated enough so far.

moooo99 4y ago

Its hilarious. I recently moved and wanted to update the registration info for my car. My city boasts about having an "online self service for anything you'd usually need" (sad enough that this alone is a rare achievement), so naive me decided to give it a try. I successfully registered and wanted to update the info on my car, but got stopped by a disclaimer saying "if you want to do this online with your eID, you need to attach a picture of your ID to the form"?!. I burst out laughing, wondering what the point of this eID even is. And I still haven't updated my info

lzauz 4y ago

znpy 4y ago
I wouldn’t call such people mentally invalid. However, as an Italian, i understand your feelings. Public administration has always been the land of bureaucratic people that want to see sheets of paper, stamps and signatures. They’re almost often unfamiliar with technology and they are mostly unwilling to change their workload. The real problem if very often that upper management is often also old and unfamiliar with technology too, hence incapable of understanding the value that technology could bring hence unwilling to push its adoption.
- lzauz 4y ago
  You are being too benevolent. You think progress in bureaucracy is being resisted because those people are "old and unfamiliar", but they actively resist it because their paycheck depends on it. They know if they get fired they are completely useless in the job market.
- TimPC 4y ago
  The tolerance for high salaries in government is basically non-existant. People throw fits in my region about teachers with 30 years experience and the maximum scale making just over $100k/year Canadian (just over $70k/USD). So you can imagine what it's like to try and hire senior developers (five years experience) at around $90k when top of the market is quadruple that and a large number of companies pay double that. The end result is they hire from the bottom 25% of developers, the bottom 25% of product managers and the bottom 25% of managers. Add to that a large dysfunctional bureaucracy and they are lucky if they get people 10% as productive as in competing companies. It's a colossal problem because government routinely fails at building technology and then outsources it at extreme cost. That outsourcing isn't always successful either in part because the requirements hinge on those same Product Managers that government can hire on extremely restricted budgets.

leonry 4y ago

A couple of years ago, I would have concurred. But for some time already you have the possibility to use the e-ID through Postident (https://www.deutschepost.de/de/p/postident/privatkunden/identifikation-mit-eid.html https://www.deutschepost.de/de/p/postident/privatkunden/iden...) which is kind of well integrated in many businesses. Moreover you have private / corporate solutions like Verimi (https://verimi.de/ https://verimi.de/) that incorporate functionalities of the e-ID. There is even an alternative (https://www.openecard.org/startseite/ https://www.openecard.org/startseite/) to the official app. (EDIT: The alternative is open-source, but so is the official app. Removed adjective.) I really like the development that has gone into the e-ID. They even have thought out a safe way to update your PIN (https://www.pin-ruecksetzbrief-bestellen.de/ https://www.pin-ruecksetzbrief-bestellen.de/)! The biggest drawback of all is the lack of any marketing, IMHO.

dmacvicar 4y ago
The official app is already open-source: https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp2 https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp2
- leonry 4y ago
  True, that wasn't well formulated.

woah 4y ago

Makes a lot of sense with German culture IMO. There's a culture of doing your job very well, but not much of a culture of thinking outside of the box or shaking things up. Some Herr Doktor probably followed all the best practices to implement "trust zones, certificates, authorization features, and much more" in the ID, doing their job really well. But actually changing the processes to use those features is not anyone's job, and might actually eliminate a lot of jobs, so it never happened.

numpad0 4y ago
I think modern political criticisms might be too dismissive of inefficient bureaucratic developments, or we might be taking criticisms too seriously. They might be slow, complicated, budgeted terribly, unbelievably incompetent by standards of typical for-profit mega corporation, but a lot of those projects work at first try and works for decades, in the end. SLS capsule came back in one piece on first try. That German ID system probably works too. And that’s great.
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  It is good this project is failing. Such a thing will never fly in the US. Both the left and right will rightfully or wrongfully oppose it for different reasons. Edit: E.g. see the left opposing voter ids in the US.
  - romwell 4y ago
    >Edit: E.g. see the left opposing voter ids in the US. FYI, the left wasn't opposing voter IDs. The left was opposing Voter ID laws, which required a voter to have an ID, while selectively providing these IDs to the population. That's a uniquely American problem. We wouldn't have an issue with a Voter ID law if everyone was guaranteed to have a state ID, regardless of where they live, whether they have a car or not, and whether they have money to pay for it (it should be free).
    - snowpid 4y ago

Lanz 4y ago

It's almost as if the spirit of the people was broken as Germany drifted more and more leftward.

ln_00 4y ago
wow. You won the award of the most stupid comment on this post.
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
alexseman 4y ago
dang 4y ago
Oh dear. Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. It's predictable, nasty, and not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Zagill 4y ago
Yeah, they should try going to the right again. The people were very spirited last time

kune 4y ago

I actually use my German ID card to communicate with the Elster service of the German tax offices. My old USB signing stick would need to be replaced next year, but using my ID card was the cheaper option.

Semaphor 4y ago
You can also generate a certificate. Registering it requires receiving a letter by snail mail and it expires every X years (5 maybe?), but otherwise it's just like your certificate for your server you use to SSH in.
- lakomen 4y ago
  2 years
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    3 years. I’m back at my computer and checked, my certificates were 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022

tpm 4y ago

Many more applications will come in coming years. They are being implemented right now, I think this was sped up by some law that municipalities have to provide those services online by 2026? Not sure. Anyway there is a huge backlog and not enough programmers but one way or another this has to be done.

GTP 4y ago

In The Netherlands, they are implementing a thing which gives the same advantages (i.e. disclose some attributes about yourself without disclosing unneeded data), but uses different technologies. It's called IRMA, you can find an overview here [1]. It can be combined with other applications to do cool stuff, e.g. with PostGuard [2] you can use identity-based encryption to be able to send an encrypted email to someone, but without the need to know their public key in advance, nor having to authenticate it. The drawback is that you have to trust a central server and a third party identity provider. [1] https://irma.app/ https://irma.app/ [2] https://postguard.eu/ https://postguard.eu/

catiopatio 4y ago
From the website: > With IRMA it is easy to log in and make yourself known, by disclosing only relevant attributes of yourself. For instance, in order to watch a certain movie online, you prove that you are older than 16, and nothing else. That’s not “cool stuff”.
- bmn__ 4y ago
  You present the conclusion only. Please share the train of thoughts that made you arrive at it, because it is not obvious.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    It’s not cool that content would be restricted to people that can prove they are older than 16. It requires very little imagination to see how this could be extended to restrict content to people that have a yellow star on their clothes.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      This does not follow, in the same way that the existence of the police does not imply a slide towards a police state. The slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy. Besides, at least around here they already ask for an ID if you look young enough, for some movies. This is not enabled by new technologies.

sandos 4y ago

Its fascinating what EU can accomplish, but in my mind drivers licenses and "national IDs" (that are usable when travelling in EU) should be merged and unified over the union. Imagine how much simpler things would be! And this tech used in Germany sounds like a very nice base for it. I mean I would also make them passports but I think that is impossible.

joeschmopoe 4y ago
Lots of people don't have a license but do move around and across EU borders a lot. The IDs are actually heavily unified nowadays https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_the_European_Economic_Area#New_European_Union_standards_from_2019 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_t...
bee_rider 4y ago
I would imagine that different countries might had slightly different traffic laws or acceptable risk levels, so might want to have their own licensing schemes. Maybe the could have a unified form-factor that gets stamped by the individual countries though.
- joeschmopoe 4y ago
  They do, all IDs are in ID-1 form factor, stamped by the countries and the EU [1]. It's the same for driver's licenses [2], they are accepted in all EU member states and basically look exactly the same, just in different languages and show a different flag. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_the_European_Economic_Area#New_European_Union_standards_from_2019 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_t... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_driving_licence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_driving_licence
bobbruno 4y ago
This may be difficult for an American to understand, but a driver's license is not a core document, and many people may not have it. In most places it'd not come to mind in a discussion about digital ID.

roenxi 4y ago

The scars of WWII have well and truly healed if people are comfortable with this technology. The 1900s accrued a lot of experience with where this will go. Usually I'll argue for market efficiency over other concerns; but in this case the Europeans are on to something with the GDPR. The role of government is to make this sort of personalised identification hard - not to enable it. The end game is going to be hard times and mass discrimination against minorities.

stkdump 4y ago

I use my Personalausweis to submit tax stuff, to get the current status of the government pension fund (I can know at any time, not just once per year how many Rentenpunkte I have) and to submit local requests for my city (for example changes for the garbage collection service). My phone serves as the card reader using NFC. It works like a charm.

PYTHONDJANGO 4y ago

Unfortunately still many people working in tec jobs do not understand that putting an ID on an official governmental document that you need to carry is effectively the same like a tattoo with a number on your arm. Despite Germans have made bad experiences with that, the idea survived the 3rd Reich. The idea that as a human being you need "governmental documents" to identify is an authoritarian core value that is fundamentally against individual freedom. Jews were forced to always carry their "Kennkarte" with them. Please do not tell me about positive use cases that are based on the naive idea that "the government is the good guys". When electronic IDs are not rolled back everywhere then democracy and individual freedom will be lost for a very long time.

shapefrog 4y ago
We should pay vast quantities to microsoft or google do it, they can be trusted ... right