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by mrweasel 722 days ago
While we complain about it a lot, more and more I have come to appreciate the Danish governments online ID solution (MitID). It's certainly not perfect, but it does allow you to do ID verification, without exposing PII to companies.

Understandably not everyone who needs to verify your identity is going to implement MitID, I can understand X not wanting to do that for the limited amount of users they have in Denmark. It's simply not worth the cost. What I don't get is why more countries doesn't have this. The US sure seem like it would benefit greatly from having a standardized, safe and secure online ID (MitID may or may not be as secure as it could be).
3 comments
Brybry 721 days ago
The US has no national ID and for historical ideological reasons the pushes for a national ID fail.

That's why social security numbers are abused as a form of national ID number. The closest thing we have is the "Real ID" standard for state IDs/driver's licenses (well, ignoring passports). [1]

So right now government solutions are done individually by states (if at all), usually as some form of "wallet" / "mDL" (mobile driver's license) phone app.

All the state ID databases are supposed to be able to talk to each other, eventually, so maybe some day a big state's system will allow verifying IDs from other states but there might be political issues that block that.

I guess the other option is that a big state's system (like say California's OpenCred[2]) gets popular enough for all the other states to implement it. But I'm not hopeful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act

[2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/ca-dmv-wallet/opencred-for-dev...

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anal_reactor 721 days ago
EU is working on this, but it's going to take a lot of time before the system actually works for all member countries.
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6510 721 days ago
I haven't looked into it much but if the EU digital identity turns out something nice and usable the platforms should love implementing it. (Not holding my breath)

All I really want is to obtain a link by posting a key and some identifier, redirect the user there, have them log in, redirect them back and send my webhook a code that represents that user on my website.

A registered business would be able to (for example) request/buy age restriction.

Ideally non EU citizen could also obtain a digital ID.

That way I can stay blissfully ignorant about who you are and where you live. All I want is a single account per user (in stead of 100 000 and/or captchas)

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