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by htag 1210 days ago
I agree that we need a better identity solution than sharing email addresses or phone numbers with hundreds of third parties. I disagree that digital identities should be tied to government records, or that networked identification is an operating system level problem to solve.

Problems with this approach:

1. Participation in the internet should not be contingent on being documented by a government.

2. There are ~200 countries, so this adaptation will require worldwide collaboration by a lot of parties. Governments and borders change or are disputed all the time. Are all 200 countries trustworthy as identity issuers on this network? Who decides who is trustworthy?

3. This will increase the leverage a government has over it's citizens, by giving them an avenue to cut their communication lines with the rest of the world.

4. Governments are notoriously slow for adapting new technologies. Governments are notorious for wanting backdoors in technologies. Can we trust them to keep this up to date, secure, and to migrate to any new advancements that are to come?