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Identity providing is a natural monopoly and should be provided by the state in same manner as a passport is provided. We can discuss the implementation but in

• snowwrestler 1y ago
  In the U.S., identity providing is not a role the government fills. Not everyone has to have a passport, for example. A passport is merely a purpose-specific tool for crossing borders, not general identity.
  • Muromec 1y ago
    Federal government or governmemts in general? As far as I get, driver licenses are doing in US what id cards are doing in Europe and are issued by governments too.
    • Workaccount2 1y ago
      In the US you don't need to have any form of ID. Your life will be very difficult, but you don't legally need it. ID is an optional service here.
      • ikiris 1y ago
        Well as long as you have specific skin colors this is true. Don't let ICE catch you with no valid form of ID if you don't look European.
      • Muromec 1y ago
        Well, what I was replying to is about who is providing the service. Whether or not the service is mandatory is a different one. I know places on the European continent where having id and registered address is mandatory, but the fine for noncomplience is about 1 EUR.
    • Brybry 1y ago
      While a driver's license does normally fill that role, it's not mandated and not everyone has a driver's license (or even a state issued ID). Some stuff like voting you can use something like a utility bill. Some stuff will want your birth certificate. Some stuff will want multiple types of documents. Americans have historically been against mandated government IDs (though mostly with the concept of a federal/national ID).
      • deathanatos 1y ago
        This whole thread is going to motte & bailey between the various forms of US gov ID. Between the union of {SSN, birth cert, driver's license (or ID in lieu thereof)}, it seems to be there's the equivalent of a federal ID. Just, like everything else we do, a terrible incomprehensible mess to Europeans. My employer requires an SSN when I start a job. TSA keeps alleging they're going to require Real ID any day now. Voting, if I have my jurisdiction's requirements right, requires an SSN, though most people will experience that in the form of driver's license, since getting a license is usually automatic voter registration where I've lived.
  • chvid 1y ago
    You have plenty of government id's in the US as well. Driver licenses, tax number, birth certificates ... I think often people mess up the subjects of privacy, freedom and a government provided id. You can have privacy and freedom even if you have a government issued id. And you can have your privacy and freedom taken away from you without the government giving you standardized way of proving your id.
    • kortilla 1y ago
      You can’t have privacy if everyone uses the government as an SSO. People might be more amenable if SSO wasn’t implemented as these stupid OIDC flows where the govt gets to know every time you login to your bank and what IP you’re using, etc.
      • chvid 1y ago
        But you can if you live in a well functioning democratic society - remember the alternative is not no id but privatized for profit identity providers like Google and Facebook.
        • Muromec 1y ago
          Well functioning democratic society is and idea that US explicitly rejects, because democratic society can point a finger at you and that doesn't feel nice.
        • kortilla 1y ago
          A well functioning democratic society is one of the valid states before an autocratic regime. The Nazi party was elected. Apart from regime changes, being a functional democratic society doesn’t protect you from technical incompetence nor does it limit the ability for people with access to the DB from abusing it.
      • lxgr 1y ago
        > You can’t have privacy if everyone uses the government as an SSO. Why not? Anonymous cryptographic attestation methods (e.g. of only the fact that you are over 18 years old, that you are a permanent resident etc.) exist.
  • loeg 1y ago
    And it is a significant flaw of the US model!
    • kortilla 1y ago
      Not if you ask people who specifically don’t want the government tracking everything
      • loeg 1y ago
        They are deluded if they think the lack of federal ID (ignoring Social Security) provides any privacy benefit, and the cost is immense.
      • tart-lemonade 1y ago
        And the worst part is a federal ID would not enable tracking any more than your employers withholding wages for tax purposes and paying into Social Security does, but every time a federal ID has been proposed (which would be really useful as a way to keep SSNs from becoming something you have to disclose to everyone and their dog) it's been shut down by the "it's all a road to tyranny" crowd. I could get a Real ID that reads "1060 W Addison St" today. All I have to do is pirate Acrobat, change the addresses on PDFs downloaded from the websites of my bank and power company, and walk into an Illinois Secretary of State office, as that's enough for the residency portion of a Real ID. They do not double-check any of this information, and I know this works because I had to edit a power bill PDF so my SO would have a second document for proof of residency. All it would take is one phone call to find out I'm the only one listed on the account, but it was never verified. Why anyone thinks a federal ID would enable mass surveillance and tracking is beyond me. The NSA doesn't need a unified federal ID to track us, and law enforcement isn't exactly foiled by people who hold fake IDs or who have no IDs whatsoever (unless being undocumented or Amish is some magical "get out of jail free" card).
      • lxgr 1y ago
        Ironically, lax to nonexistent data privacy laws and the ubiquitous use of SSNs as globally unique identifiers are achieving exactly the outcome that the lack of government ID verification purportedly achieves.
  • einarfd 1y ago
    In Norway our BankID system, which is similar to what the Danes have, is owned by the banks, and is a run by a private company. While I personally think that in principle it should be run by the government. It works well enough, and it is imo. proof that it does not have to be run by the government.
    • nand_gate 1y ago
      Isn't being run by a bank just a roundabout way to be run by the gov't? Your root of trust for said bank id is gov't documents, right?
  • matthewdgreen 1y ago
    Android and iOS now support driving licenses for seven states. They’re working on an anonymous credential library to allow you to authenticate and verify to websites, and you can use tap-to-ID with TSA. You’re right that not everyone has a DMV-issued ID but other than that, we’re pretty close to having an optional national electronic ID.
• riffraff 1y ago
  italy has quite an interesting system[0] where multiple identity providers (authorized by the State) can be used to provide identification against the central database. It'll probably be phased out at some point, but it's quite cool. [0] https://www.spid.gov.it/en/citizens/ https://www.spid.gov.it/en/citizens/ it integrates with eIDAS too
  • lxgr 1y ago
    If it integrates with eIDAS, it doesn't necessarily have to be phased out. A very good pragmatic decision of eIDAS was recognizing that many member countries have different existing eID schemes, and federating them is easier than rolling out a new one from scratch.
    • riffraff 1y ago
      it doesn't, but there is already a competing system based on the national id card, which is just simpler to explain to people ("you log in with your ID card" vs "you log in with a third party identity provider where you need to create an account"), and the people who championed the old system are no longer around.
  • magicalhippo 1y ago
    Similar for gov't stuff here in Norway, where you can use the govt's own ID system (MinID), the common bank ID system (BankID), and a couple of commercial smart card solutions (Comfides, Buypass).
• sneak 1y ago
  Absolutely not! The moment you have universal state-issued identity, you will be expected to provide it for everything, including tons of stuff that doesn’t require identity. Don’t be a privacy defeatist, the fight isn’t lost yet. Resist every single effort to make it easier for merchants and private entities to strongly identify users. The rows go into databases and they never go away. State-issued identity is one of the fundamental building blocks of a totalitarian police state that has universal surveillance.
  • stef25 1y ago
    We have universal ID cards here in Belgium. They have a chip and along with a special card reader usb device you can log in to govt websites related to taxes, pension and basically everything else. If you have a smartphone you can use an app to scan a QR and log in that way. It's super convenient. Where is the privacy problem if you use this system to consult your own civil data ? Privacy is a thing in the EU and it's a complex issue mainly because of these tech behemoths that need to know your shoe size before you can use their todo list app. > Resist every single effort to make it easier for merchants and private entities to strongly identify users How is this related to govt issued ID cards ?
    • Dylan16807 1y ago
      If it's easy enough to connect such an ID with arbitrary companies, I don't trust US privacy laws to prevent them from requiring it.
      • Muromec 1y ago
        Maybe not having IDs is the reason why US doesn't have privacy protections and everybody can buy all the data anyway for 5 bucks from ad tech and telecoms.
    • sneak 1y ago
      The moment private entities can avoid spending money on auth and anti-sybil, they will simply default to using the government IdP, because auth is hard and fixing exceptions is expensive (CSRs, etc). Then, you will simply have to provide full government ID to every business for every transaction. Instant surveillance state (given that they can access all business records). This is not a world in which you wish to live. It is very important that you be able to transact without ID.
• k4rli 1y ago
  This yet another USA defaultism post. I have developed for several banks in Europe and EIDAS + other national ID based systems are the standard. Some also allow authentication with their own apps, but still having alternate options smartcard with reader or smartcard based national app. Most seem to favour using apereo CAS for it even though it seems overkill and overly complicated (especially upgrading it, lacking documentation) most of the time.
• lq9AJ8yrfs 1y ago
  Hard disagree. If the only the state can give you an identity, then the state can take away your identity.