5 ms·

The problem is what follows. They will make it mandatory to use the electronic ID to do anything, resulting in total surveillance. And if you happen to land on

by jdrek1 5mo ago

The problem is what follows. They will make it mandatory to use the electronic ID to do anything, resulting in total surveillance. And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing.

jcattle 5mo ago
"They" will make it mandatory? Who is they? How will the current approach result in total surveillance? I would much prefer hotels would have a scanner which just transmits the bare minimum of identifiable information from the ID instead of it being completely normalized in many countries/hotels that they take your ID card and scan the full thing. Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food?
- dzhiurgis 5mo ago
  > Who is they? You see, the government wants to control the people so they can control the government /s
- pzo 5mo ago
  > Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food? Some government (will) make mandatory: social accounts (so also IM apps like IG, WA, X, messanger), banks, buying simcard, internet, buying alcohol, cigarettes, energy drinks). Some companies will make it mandatory implicitly or explicitly just for profit: selling your consumption data, analytics for themselves. E.g. in poland it's harder and harder to pay with cash because reduced stuff and huge queues - they force your use self checking. The pricing changed also that you have to use their loyalty apps if you don't want to be ripped - otherwise you will be paying 50% more. > I would much prefer hotels would have a scanner which just transmits the bare minimum of identifiable information from the ID instead of it being completely normalized in many countries/hotels that they take your ID card and scan the full thing. I don't like it either the problem is right now you mostly this being abused only in some hotels. Whats misleading that that this digital id won't allow tracking because you supposed to "trasmitting the bare minimum of identifiable information"
- thomasingalls 5mo ago
  Are you kidding right now? Have you seen what's happening with ICE in the US? EU countries are just one effective social media campaign cycle away from the same policies. "It can't happen here" is foolish thinking. See also: CCP
  - grey-area 5mo ago
    Policies are the problem here, not tools.
- dwedge 5mo ago
  > Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food? Why did you only ask about eID and not about "inescapable digital currencies" that was also mentioned in the same paragraph at the top of the thread?
- zelphirkalt 5mo ago
  Only that it won't stay at the minimum information. They will want more and more, with some thinly veiled greed for more info. For example hotels: Some chains may think to advertise using fear mongering, claiming that their hotels are the safest, because they perform background checks based on the information from their customers' ID. You don't want that? Fine! Go elsewhere then! This is private property, if you don't agree to these ToS, you are not allowed to enter or rent rooms, sooo sorry! All you had to do is sign your privacy away here and then let us mine your data ... You don't have anything to hide, do you?? The issue is, that every single involved party from business to government has an incentive to get more data from this system. If there are no laws with guaranteed severe punishments for violations edged into our inalienable human rights and constitutions and those are properly followed up on, in addition to making it technologically impossible to extract more information than necessary, the system sooner or later will be abused.
- abc123abc123 5mo ago
  Easy. This was done during corona. They have security at the entrace of food stores and scanners. If you do not scan, security will escort you off the premises. I prefer hotels without ID requirements. There is not a single shred of sound argument why a hotel needs to know who I am. Therefore I often stay in B&B:s without authoritarian ID-controls.
silversmith 5mo ago
In Latvia we've had digital id for close to 20 years. Banks mostly use their own auth, some rely on digital id. No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping. What we use it for is access to government resources, and signing digital documents. I trust this system WAY more than whatever some company comes up with.
- bluebarbet 5mo ago
  This is an interesting and hopeful datapoint.
- petre 5mo ago
  > No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping Yup, until they are regulated to do so in case you buy booze, porn, metal detectors, crossbows or who knows what else. And until silversmith tries to dodge the draft but he accidentaly bought some booze woth his gov eID to party with friends.
  - vrganj 5mo ago
    What's stopping anyone from requiring a passport scan right now?
- abc123abc123 5mo ago
  No limitations during corona? Remember travelling through your neighbour during corona and was treated worse than a ww2 jew in germany due to not having the authoritarian corona passport. This is what our every day will be like, when the state has internalized the enormous power of a 100% controlled digital ID. Bye, bye, freedom of thought.
  - silversmith 5mo ago
    You are most likely referring to the EU covid certificate. It functioned as a proof of vaccination or recent negative test, and yeah, that was required for travel at one point. And even then the verification end was `(code: string) -> valid: boolean` function, no personal data was accessible at validation point. It used the digital ID as SSO for accessing your records, so you could save / print the verification code, usually in form of a qr code. I know all this, because I'm friends with people that worked on the Latvian part of the system, and we spent long chat sessions discussing how to best do it in the least privacy-intrusive way. If you were from outside EU, I fully believe the experience was subpar. 99% or more of verifications went through the EU system, and if you showed up with different kind of documentation, the people tasked with verification "at the edge" might not even know if it was valid form of proof. Overall, I struggle with being outraged by the concept of digital ID. It's just a digital form of "show me your passport please". We have had physical national ID (mandatory from certain age!) for as long as I can remember myself. The state knows I exist. If a madman gets put in charge, lack of unified digital ID is not going to prevent airport style passport gates being erected around the booze stand.
TeMPOraL 5mo ago
> And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing. Not really. Government is not Big Tech. This happens with accounts of some tech companies precisely because they're private entities setting their own rules in the still wild "wild west" of the Internet. Governments set laws and processes to ensure the things you mentioned do not happen, except in very specific circumstances. Think of it this way: being "locked out of life completely", resulting in "no banking, no traveling, no communication", etc. is not a new problem. In the off-line world we call that being sanctioned, imprisoned, deprived of personal freedoms, etc. Yes, it happens to some people, but usually for very specific reasons (called "crimes"), after a lengthy bureaucratic process (called "trial" and "sentencing"), with plenty of safeguards to catch and rectify mistakes during and after the fact (like "legal defenses", "appeals", or even "journalists"). It is not something you normally worry about. Humanity has worked out best practices for these thing over thousands of years of various tribes and nations and governments forming, disbanding, collapsing, emerging, conquering or becoming conquered. Adding electronic IDs on top does not change the nature of the thing. So you won't get locked out of life for posting the wrong emoji in a tax report comment; that would be like being thrown to prison for drawing something on a government form - or rather, if that's even remotely possible in your country, you have much bigger problems than digital IDs, and your best move would be to emigrate somewhere sane before borders close or civil war starts. Plenty of other things to worry about here (e.g. ID checks suddenly being required by every business, just because it's zero effort to them for some marginal KYC benefit), but getting banned from life due to ToS violation is not one of them.
- Zak 5mo ago
  Being banned from life due to a TOS violation is a real concern because it's already hard to do a bunch of things without a Google or Apple account. If Google and Apple can require a government ID to create such an account, it becomes very difficult to evade a ban. Options to get around that problem include regulating Apple and Google or mandating that essential services not require accounts with third-party providers.
  - 5mo ago
SoftTalker 5mo ago
They already do this. KYC, and similar laws. You can't open a bank account in 2026 (at least in the USA) without ID. You can't get credit, open an investment account, buy a house, vote, or be employed without an ID. A proper digital ID would eliminate a lot of problems we now have with identity theft, having to obsessively protect names, dates of birth, SSNs in our databases (these things were not considered secrets in the pre-internet era). Yes, we need to be vigilant about freedoms and privacy. But the idea of a government-issued ID that "proves" who you are is not new and I struggle to think of any way identity can be "proven" without a central issuing authority.
- laughing_man 5mo ago
  A proper digital ID would certainly make things more difficult for thieves, but if someone actually did manage to clone your ID you'd be in a world of hurt, since businesses would start to trust that ID to a greater extent than they trust anything online now.
  - grey-area 5mo ago
    But governments would be obliged to ensure that wouldn't happen and fix it if it did. We trust them to do the same for passports etc and it works fairly well.
    - laughing_man 5mo ago
      There's quite a bit less incentive to clone a passport, though. A guy in Pakistan can't clone my passport and use it to clean out my bank account.
Muromec 5mo ago
>The problem is what follows Does it actually follow? It's there for 25 years in some European countries and "everyone" isn't on a government bad list dying of hunger.
- betaby 5mo ago
  Not sure if that sarcasm or you are serious. But yes, people have issues with access to banking in EU all the time.
  - Muromec 5mo ago
    I heard stories about banks (mostly the app ones) closing accounts for "no reason" (there is always a reason and it's mostly quite simple), but I haven't heard stories about accounts being refused to be opened or clsoed for not having a digital id. And double so for this happening because the government put them on a list. The government of course can put you on the list, but they don't need digital id for that. They pass a law, the regulator sends the list to all the banks and boom, you are blocked. I guess we should not have banks or not have the government too.
abc123abc123 5mo ago
This is the way.

by jdrek1 5mo ago

jcattle 5mo ago

"They" will make it mandatory? Who is they? How will the current approach result in total surveillance? I would much prefer hotels would have a scanner which just transmits the bare minimum of identifiable information from the ID instead of it being completely normalized in many countries/hotels that they take your ID card and scan the full thing. Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food?

dzhiurgis 5mo ago
> Who is they? You see, the government wants to control the people so they can control the government /s
pzo 5mo ago
> Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food? Some government (will) make mandatory: social accounts (so also IM apps like IG, WA, X, messanger), banks, buying simcard, internet, buying alcohol, cigarettes, energy drinks). Some companies will make it mandatory implicitly or explicitly just for profit: selling your consumption data, analytics for themselves. E.g. in poland it's harder and harder to pay with cash because reduced stuff and huge queues - they force your use self checking. The pricing changed also that you have to use their loyalty apps if you don't want to be ripped - otherwise you will be paying 50% more. > I would much prefer hotels would have a scanner which just transmits the bare minimum of identifiable information from the ID instead of it being completely normalized in many countries/hotels that they take your ID card and scan the full thing. I don't like it either the problem is right now you mostly this being abused only in some hotels. Whats misleading that that this digital id won't allow tracking because you supposed to "trasmitting the bare minimum of identifiable information"
thomasingalls 5mo ago
Are you kidding right now? Have you seen what's happening with ICE in the US? EU countries are just one effective social media campaign cycle away from the same policies. "It can't happen here" is foolish thinking. See also: CCP
- grey-area 5mo ago
  Policies are the problem here, not tools.
dwedge 5mo ago
> Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food? Why did you only ask about eID and not about "inescapable digital currencies" that was also mentioned in the same paragraph at the top of the thread?
zelphirkalt 5mo ago
Only that it won't stay at the minimum information. They will want more and more, with some thinly veiled greed for more info. For example hotels: Some chains may think to advertise using fear mongering, claiming that their hotels are the safest, because they perform background checks based on the information from their customers' ID. You don't want that? Fine! Go elsewhere then! This is private property, if you don't agree to these ToS, you are not allowed to enter or rent rooms, sooo sorry! All you had to do is sign your privacy away here and then let us mine your data ... You don't have anything to hide, do you?? The issue is, that every single involved party from business to government has an incentive to get more data from this system. If there are no laws with guaranteed severe punishments for violations edged into our inalienable human rights and constitutions and those are properly followed up on, in addition to making it technologically impossible to extract more information than necessary, the system sooner or later will be abused.
abc123abc123 5mo ago
Easy. This was done during corona. They have security at the entrace of food stores and scanners. If you do not scan, security will escort you off the premises. I prefer hotels without ID requirements. There is not a single shred of sound argument why a hotel needs to know who I am. Therefore I often stay in B&B:s without authoritarian ID-controls.

silversmith 5mo ago

In Latvia we've had digital id for close to 20 years. Banks mostly use their own auth, some rely on digital id. No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping. What we use it for is access to government resources, and signing digital documents. I trust this system WAY more than whatever some company comes up with.

bluebarbet 5mo ago
This is an interesting and hopeful datapoint.
petre 5mo ago
> No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping Yup, until they are regulated to do so in case you buy booze, porn, metal detectors, crossbows or who knows what else. And until silversmith tries to dodge the draft but he accidentaly bought some booze woth his gov eID to party with friends.
- vrganj 5mo ago
  What's stopping anyone from requiring a passport scan right now?
abc123abc123 5mo ago
No limitations during corona? Remember travelling through your neighbour during corona and was treated worse than a ww2 jew in germany due to not having the authoritarian corona passport. This is what our every day will be like, when the state has internalized the enormous power of a 100% controlled digital ID. Bye, bye, freedom of thought.
- silversmith 5mo ago
  You are most likely referring to the EU covid certificate. It functioned as a proof of vaccination or recent negative test, and yeah, that was required for travel at one point. And even then the verification end was `(code: string) -> valid: boolean` function, no personal data was accessible at validation point. It used the digital ID as SSO for accessing your records, so you could save / print the verification code, usually in form of a qr code. I know all this, because I'm friends with people that worked on the Latvian part of the system, and we spent long chat sessions discussing how to best do it in the least privacy-intrusive way. If you were from outside EU, I fully believe the experience was subpar. 99% or more of verifications went through the EU system, and if you showed up with different kind of documentation, the people tasked with verification "at the edge" might not even know if it was valid form of proof. Overall, I struggle with being outraged by the concept of digital ID. It's just a digital form of "show me your passport please". We have had physical national ID (mandatory from certain age!) for as long as I can remember myself. The state knows I exist. If a madman gets put in charge, lack of unified digital ID is not going to prevent airport style passport gates being erected around the booze stand.

TeMPOraL 5mo ago

> And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing. Not really. Government is not Big Tech. This happens with accounts of some tech companies precisely because they're private entities setting their own rules in the still wild "wild west" of the Internet. Governments set laws and processes to ensure the things you mentioned do not happen, except in very specific circumstances. Think of it this way: being "locked out of life completely", resulting in "no banking, no traveling, no communication", etc. is not a new problem. In the off-line world we call that being sanctioned, imprisoned, deprived of personal freedoms, etc. Yes, it happens to some people, but usually for very specific reasons (called "crimes"), after a lengthy bureaucratic process (called "trial" and "sentencing"), with plenty of safeguards to catch and rectify mistakes during and after the fact (like "legal defenses", "appeals", or even "journalists"). It is not something you normally worry about. Humanity has worked out best practices for these thing over thousands of years of various tribes and nations and governments forming, disbanding, collapsing, emerging, conquering or becoming conquered. Adding electronic IDs on top does not change the nature of the thing. So you won't get locked out of life for posting the wrong emoji in a tax report comment; that would be like being thrown to prison for drawing something on a government form - or rather, if that's even remotely possible in your country, you have much bigger problems than digital IDs, and your best move would be to emigrate somewhere sane before borders close or civil war starts. Plenty of other things to worry about here (e.g. ID checks suddenly being required by every business, just because it's zero effort to them for some marginal KYC benefit), but getting banned from life due to ToS violation is not one of them.

Zak 5mo ago
Being banned from life due to a TOS violation is a real concern because it's already hard to do a bunch of things without a Google or Apple account. If Google and Apple can require a government ID to create such an account, it becomes very difficult to evade a ban. Options to get around that problem include regulating Apple and Google or mandating that essential services not require accounts with third-party providers.
- 5mo ago

SoftTalker 5mo ago

They already do this. KYC, and similar laws. You can't open a bank account in 2026 (at least in the USA) without ID. You can't get credit, open an investment account, buy a house, vote, or be employed without an ID. A proper digital ID would eliminate a lot of problems we now have with identity theft, having to obsessively protect names, dates of birth, SSNs in our databases (these things were not considered secrets in the pre-internet era). Yes, we need to be vigilant about freedoms and privacy. But the idea of a government-issued ID that "proves" who you are is not new and I struggle to think of any way identity can be "proven" without a central issuing authority.

laughing_man 5mo ago
A proper digital ID would certainly make things more difficult for thieves, but if someone actually did manage to clone your ID you'd be in a world of hurt, since businesses would start to trust that ID to a greater extent than they trust anything online now.
- grey-area 5mo ago
  But governments would be obliged to ensure that wouldn't happen and fix it if it did. We trust them to do the same for passports etc and it works fairly well.
  - laughing_man 5mo ago
    There's quite a bit less incentive to clone a passport, though. A guy in Pakistan can't clone my passport and use it to clean out my bank account.

Muromec 5mo ago

>The problem is what follows Does it actually follow? It's there for 25 years in some European countries and "everyone" isn't on a government bad list dying of hunger.

betaby 5mo ago
Not sure if that sarcasm or you are serious. But yes, people have issues with access to banking in EU all the time.
- Muromec 5mo ago
  I heard stories about banks (mostly the app ones) closing accounts for "no reason" (there is always a reason and it's mostly quite simple), but I haven't heard stories about accounts being refused to be opened or clsoed for not having a digital id. And double so for this happening because the government put them on a list. The government of course can put you on the list, but they don't need digital id for that. They pass a law, the regulator sends the list to all the banks and boom, you are blocked. I guess we should not have banks or not have the government too.

abc123abc123 5mo ago

This is the way.