The scariest thing is the casual mention of the Digital Credentials API[1]. Forget passkeys, when you need government issued credentials to surf the net, the good times are over.
There are plenty of websites and services already where you need to prove your identity to use them. The digital credentials API is an attempt to standardise that which is already legally required in the US, the UK, Australia, and the EU, except without having to upload a picture of your ID to a shady third party website.
I've never had to upload my government ID to any site; and none of my family have either. It's beyond naive to think that enshrining such a protocol won't lead to more widespread adoption, and even legislation requiring it. It's infrastructure that is quietly being built first, and enthusiastic authoritarian governments will eagerly embrace it.
Have you read their document? They require Google Wallet with the Google Play Services to prove your id on your desktop computer, it's absolute insanity. No thanks.
I've never seen a legitimate use case where I need to prove my identity to use a website anyways.
The UK law is age verification not identity verification. Now, everyone in practice has collapsed that distinction, whether from incompetence or malice..
Age verification inevitably turns into identity verification. And this is by design.
Age verification obviously is the excuse to implement identity verification.
It's likely that the websites need your actual government issued credentials are not your twitters and your hacker news, but government websites that actually need to link the web user to the citizen. As an example my country has a portal that you use as a citizen to book appointments to government institutions, keeps you updated about the status of your requests, allows you to securely upload scans for additional documents that your request might need, etc.
Or corpos decide the time is ripe to force users to do it, so they can better optimize their surveillance targeting. Google has been nagging me with a periodic Android popup for like a decade to "add my birthday to help them comply with the law". Eventually that tack of borderline misleading will turn into an outright demand.
No? A few percent of people dissenting doesn't move the needle for the company analysts, all the "competitors" tend to move in lock step since their managements are all tuned into the same memestream, and using such systems has steadily become more de facto mandatory for many previously-unrelated tasks.
From my perspective we can talk about that when it actually happens. No need to slide on that slippery slope just yet, or at least, not in my neighbourhood...