Not for the masses. They cannot be bothered and most likely don't care until it is too late.
For the technologist, it is easy to circumvent in the private sphere of life at least.
I foresee however, a digital ID that will be tied to all your essential services, that you will be required to have in order to live, and that's the tracking and communication point that will be used to get a hold of you.
Kind of like the chinese social credit score, but in the EU of tomorrow, your digital EU idea will be the choking point. Do something out of line, and it can be revoked and with it, your bank, credit cards, health care, travel and other services.
> but in the EU of tomorrow, your digital EU idea will be the choking point. Do something out of line, and it can be revoked and with it, your bank, credit cards, health care, travel and other services.
I won't say that future will never happen only because "never" is a long time, but that's not happening in the foreseeable future.
I'm in Germany right now, and theoretically my ID card can be used online.
In practice, "Digitalisierung" is kinda a joke here, much like "paperless office".
For example, I have to visit an office to activate that feature of my ID card, and another to tell them I've moved.
During the pandemic, they briefly realised they didn't need to do that, then they forgot.
Likewise with health, there's more than one health insurance provider just in Germany, let alone the whole EU, and if I move country (not just travel, move) my previous insurance isn't likely to work in the new place anyway — it would take substantial improvements before it would even be possible for someone to corrut it the way you're afraid of.
Germany is a lot less digital than the rest of Europe though. Germans by-and-large even refuse to use debit cards (pin&chip). It's so strange visiting Germany as a tourist and not being able to pay with my card in a restaurant for example.
Germany has a very well established electronic cash system in the form of Girocard because the overwhelming majority has a Girokonto and thus no need for a separate payment method. So why should any business in Germany go through the trouble to offer additional payment options for the extremely few cases where a customer cannot pay via Girocard or with cash?
If you are frustrated that you cannot use your card you should blame whoever issued it to you. It's their responsibility to convince businesses to offer their payment method.
> Germans by-and-large even refuse to use debit cards (pin&chip)
I’d call that a minority, especially since Covid.
> not being able to pay with my card in a restaurant for example
An even smaller minority, especially for restaurants, slightly larger for non-chain fast food places that probably also cheat on taxes.
I don’t carry cash with me and pay almost everything with my MC debit or AMEX credit card, even in cases I can’t do that, I’d be able to pay with girocard (non-MC/Visa debit card, a widespread local system) if I had one.
>>An even smaller minority, especially for restaurants, slightly larger for non-chain fast food places that probably also cheat on taxes.
Personal anecdote, but I've been travelling through Germany this winter and outside of motorway petrol stations and big supermarkets pretty much no one would accept my Visa/MasterCard cards - "EC Karten" only everywhere. We went to a big restaurant which I assumed would be ok because I could see the card terminal at the till, and at the end they told me it's EC Karten only - had to drive around at 11pm to find a working ATM just to withdraw some euro to pay them, while my wife and son waited at the restaurant - absolute nonsense.
The future is here in the Netherlands though. Your driver's licence is tapped to your phone so your banking app can read it via NFC, etc. - would not be surprised if other apps require the same (after all, we need to vet who is on social media - it could be kids!)
Worked for deprioritizing biodiversity efforts for the sake of mass produced animal products, because, more processing steps => higher economic yield. Money talks.
You actually get them to use it? That's the problem with most of these ideas: sure, you can just roll your own encryption, chat program, etc., but getting the people in your life to use it is another matter. My mom has enough trouble using the popular and ubiquitous chat app we communicate through; something custom is going to be beyond her.
Going custom is beyond the majority of people, of course pedophiles will still be able to avoid being spied on, while the everyday Joe won't spend time to. I even doubt everyday Joe will know about this
At the end, it could be a OS-based scanning, so no matter if the message is encrypted in transit, or self-hosted, then if the message is displayed it could be transmitted and scanned.
That will never fly in every Linux distribution (if any at all), so there’s never going to be a way to stop this for even reasonably proficient criminals.
Many, and most of them are easy enough that anyone seriously concerned with privacy or secrecy will use them. They do take effort though, which means that while journalists, lawyers, corporations, governments, privacy nerds, and criminals will use them, the average person will not.
What we would lose is that secure communication is actually mainstream now. Billions of people, many of whom don't even know what "end to end encrypted" means use messaging services with strong encryption including WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, even Facebook chat in some cases. These services make mass surveillance difficult or impossible, and targeted surveillance of their users requires significant effort, such as installing malware on a target's device.
"All services normally provided for remuneration (including ad-funded services) are in scope, without no threshold in size, number of users etc."
"Only non-commercial services that are not ad-funded, such as many open source software, are out of scope"
Weird right? But it would be weirder if they would outlaw the application of mathematical operations on your own messages... oh wait that's what they are proposing... Try and stop me. Are they going to put me in jail because I don't want them to read messages between me and my friends or my wife?
> Are they going to put me in jail because I don't want them to read messages between me and my friends or my wife?
Them: "If you don't show us your messages, you are probably going to jail. So if you don't change your mind, and end up in jail without having shown us your messages, that means whatever was in those messages was way worse than going to jail. You probably knew you were going to get a longer sentence if you showed us those messages, and preferred to go with a shorter sentence of 'refusing to collaborate'."
For the technologist, it is easy to circumvent in the private sphere of life at least.
I foresee however, a digital ID that will be tied to all your essential services, that you will be required to have in order to live, and that's the tracking and communication point that will be used to get a hold of you.
Kind of like the chinese social credit score, but in the EU of tomorrow, your digital EU idea will be the choking point. Do something out of line, and it can be revoked and with it, your bank, credit cards, health care, travel and other services.