[foepys]

The German ID card ("neuer Personalausweis") can already prove to a service that you are a real human without revealing your identity in a fully automated way. It can also verify you are 18+ years old, reveal partial data, and much more.

Sadly certification for services is not easy and very bureaucratic but then at least you as a user can be sure that nothing unnecessary gets revealed to the service.

This is >10 year old technology, by the way.

[sdoering]

Being a German I actually would not use a system like this. I don't need the government to provide identity verification to third parties in an automated way. I actually don't want the government to have any data on me regarding what third parties I use.

It is enough that I need to tell the German "Verfassungsschutz" all my social media networks, all my domains, all times that I was in a foreign country for an extended stay just because I work for an agency that does projects for governmental institutions. Not that it matters, as I had to do a similar strip tease when I started my university job as a student helping the professor.

Not that I have anything to hide, but I just don't see the government having a track record of safe systems. Or keeping adversarial actordout of such systems. Additionally these systems might only be an election gone south away from falling into untrustworthy hands with me not being able to delete the collected data.

I might currently be living in a relativ (pseudo-)democracy. But if history tought us anything, that is nothing to be forever certain about.

And it might be tech that is >10 old. But I believe you will be hard pressed to find a significant amount of people in Germany (especially in tech) that would want to use it. Maybe the fact that nearly nobody is using it tells a lot about if this is an idea worth pursuing.

[foepys]

This system is completely anonymous. The government is only involved when giving out the certificates to the services and the ID card to you.

If you don't want to use this system, you will also never be able to complain about the government not offering digital services and requiring you to physically stand in line. The nPA is the base for those services and can be used today (provided the government provides the service digitally).

[encryptluks2]

I don't know how well something like this would work for an international website or service. There are a lot of challenges, like for example the centralized authority responsible for managing and creating new IDs could abuse the service. It isn't fool proof.

[foepys]

It's obviously something services have to implement for each type of ID. When you have to interact with the real world that things get a bit messy.

Companies can abstract this away and be certified by each government, e.g. like Stripe. It's nothing special.

[encryptluks2]

Again, then you have a centralized authority. Many countries already have issues with fake IDs. I guess it is better than doing nothing though.

[giaour]

> Again, then you have a centralized authority

Not really, unless you think of PayPal and Stripe as the "centralized authorities" of credit card processing. It's still a system with multiple authorities/centers of power; you'd just be paying a third party for the convenience of integrating those multiple authorities into a single layer of abstraction. If you're worried about the aggregator somehow subverting or altering your requests, you can always cut them out of the transaction.

[prox]

What’s wrong with a centralized authority here? Most countries already have everything like birth certificates and social ID numbers on file.

[encryptluks2]

Who watches the watchmen?

[giaour]

Voters, omsbudsmen, inspectors general, auditors, other levels/branches of government, etc.

[llukas]

Spammers.