Lots of disturbing things in the report, but I’d like to highlight a slight parallel elsewhere in the hopes that people can see where this could be headed if it

Lots of disturbing things in the report, but I’d like to highlight a slight parallel elsewhere in the hopes that people can see where this could be headed if it’s allowed to proceed without opposition — India and its deeply flawed Aadhaar system. When Denmark lands on biometrics and 360° surveillance by linking various accounts and documents, it will get far worse. This “unique” number in India is assigned to residents (not just citizens) based on biometrics (probabilistic) across a population of more than a billion people (which magnifies the effect of even tiny error rates). Aadhaar is claimed by the government as saving money, but its results have been denial of benefits, including causing deaths due to starvation and people not getting pensions that they’re entitled to. It has also suffered a lot of scope creep where it is now the only document that the government as well as private entities demand as an identity document for various purposes. > Armed with questionable data on the amount of benefits fraud taking place, conservative politicians have turned Denmark’s famed safety net into a polarizing political battleground. > The perception of widespread welfare fraud has empowered Jacobsen to establish one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching fraud detection systems in the world. Same thing happened in India. The “savings” were also debunked through information obtained from the government (though the Supreme Court of India just took the government’s words on savings at face value and eventually decided that this whole program is constitutional). > The bill was backed by all of the major political parties in Denmark and became law in April 2015. In India, though the opposition political parties opposed the bill, there has been no difference on the ground. All the state governments, including those where the opposition parties (centrally) are in power have embraced this number. All of them have a standard formula: a) link Aadhaar with everything b) deny subsidies to beneficiaries due to network issues, biometric issues, etc. (Aadhaar is a centrally managed database that requires network connectivity for authentication) c) deeply cut or remove the subsidies entirely after some time > Jacobsen says her algorithms don’t actually cancel benefits—they only flag people as suspicious. Ultimately, it is up to a human fraud investigator to make the final call, and citizens have the right to appeal their decisions. In India too, the law says that nobody shall be denied any benefit for want of Aadhaar. But the reality is that nothing moves without it working. At least Denmark would have to consider privacy issues and privacy laws. India does not yet have a privacy and data protection law. It’s been open season for a lot of private companies (and probably other countries) for a long time with the amount of data that has leaked and/or is cheaply available.