[Muromec]

I can't help but think people mean something else when they hear "digital ids" then what they are. Like I have a digital id from the government of the Netherlands that I use to log into their government systems to declare taxes or what not. I had an X509 certificate issued by Ukrainian government and have their app to do the same.

It's bad somehow?

[jdrek1]

The problem is what follows. They will make it mandatory to use the electronic ID to do anything, resulting in total surveillance. And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing.

[silversmith]

In Latvia we've had digital id for close to 20 years. Banks mostly use their own auth, some rely on digital id. No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping. What we use it for is access to government resources, and signing digital documents. I trust this system WAY more than whatever some company comes up with.

[petre]

> No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping

Yup, until they are regulated to do so in case you buy booze, porn, metal detectors, crossbows or who knows what else. And until silversmith tries to dodge the draft but he accidentaly bought some booze woth his gov eID to party with friends.

[vrganj]

What's stopping anyone from requiring a passport scan right now?

[bluebarbet]

This is an interesting and hopeful datapoint.

[abc123abc123]

No limitations during corona? Remember travelling through your neighbour during corona and was treated worse than a ww2 jew in germany due to not having the authoritarian corona passport.

This is what our every day will be like, when the state has internalized the enormous power of a 100% controlled digital ID. Bye, bye, freedom of thought.

[Muromec]

>was treated worse than a ww2 jew in germany due to not having the authoritarian corona passport.

If you were to be treated worse than a jew in ww2 germany, you would not be writing about it here.

[silversmith]

You are most likely referring to the EU covid certificate. It functioned as a proof of vaccination or recent negative test, and yeah, that was required for travel at one point. And even then the verification end was `(code: string) -> valid: boolean` function, no personal data was accessible at validation point. It used the digital ID as SSO for accessing your records, so you could save / print the verification code, usually in form of a qr code. I know all this, because I'm friends with people that worked on the Latvian part of the system, and we spent long chat sessions discussing how to best do it in the least privacy-intrusive way.

If you were from outside EU, I fully believe the experience was subpar. 99% or more of verifications went through the EU system, and if you showed up with different kind of documentation, the people tasked with verification "at the edge" might not even know if it was valid form of proof.

Overall, I struggle with being outraged by the concept of digital ID. It's just a digital form of "show me your passport please". We have had physical national ID (mandatory from certain age!) for as long as I can remember myself. The state knows I exist. If a madman gets put in charge, lack of unified digital ID is not going to prevent airport style passport gates being erected around the booze stand.

[Muromec]

I think what is happening is a rather philosophical rejection of the mere idea that the government should affect ones life in any way for any reason. Somehow all the laws that existed before are below the baseline, so they kinda fine, but the new things -- those cause outrage.

Then comes this post-hoc rationalization about how it will inevitably be abused, Jews in Nazi Germany, apartheid and chips under the skin.

[jcattle]

"They" will make it mandatory? Who is they?

How will the current approach result in total surveillance?

I would much prefer hotels would have a scanner which just transmits the bare minimum of identifiable information from the ID instead of it being completely normalized in many countries/hotels that they take your ID card and scan the full thing.

Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food?

[pzo]

> Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food?

Some government (will) make mandatory: social accounts (so also IM apps like IG, WA, X, messanger), banks, buying simcard, internet, buying alcohol, cigarettes, energy drinks).

Some companies will make it mandatory implicitly or explicitly just for profit: selling your consumption data, analytics for themselves. E.g. in poland it's harder and harder to pay with cash because reduced stuff and huge queues - they force your use self checking. The pricing changed also that you have to use their loyalty apps if you don't want to be ripped - otherwise you will be paying 50% more.

> I would much prefer hotels would have a scanner which just transmits the bare minimum of identifiable information from the ID instead of it being completely normalized in many countries/hotels that they take your ID card and scan the full thing.

I don't like it either the problem is right now you mostly this being abused only in some hotels. Whats misleading that that this digital id won't allow tracking because you supposed to "trasmitting the bare minimum of identifiable information"

[abc123abc123]

Easy. This was done during corona. They have security at the entrace of food stores and scanners. If you do not scan, security will escort you off the premises.

I prefer hotels without ID requirements. There is not a single shred of sound argument why a hotel needs to know who I am. Therefore I often stay in B&B:s without authoritarian ID-controls.

[zelphirkalt]

Only that it won't stay at the minimum information. They will want more and more, with some thinly veiled greed for more info.

For example hotels: Some chains may think to advertise using fear mongering, claiming that their hotels are the safest, because they perform background checks based on the information from their customers' ID. You don't want that? Fine! Go elsewhere then! This is private property, if you don't agree to these ToS, you are not allowed to enter or rent rooms, sooo sorry! All you had to do is sign your privacy away here and then let us mine your data ... You don't have anything to hide, do you??

The issue is, that every single involved party from business to government has an incentive to get more data from this system. If there are no laws with guaranteed severe punishments for violations edged into our inalienable human rights and constitutions and those are properly followed up on, in addition to making it technologically impossible to extract more information than necessary, the system sooner or later will be abused.

[dwedge]

> Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food?

Why did you only ask about eID and not about "inescapable digital currencies" that was also mentioned in the same paragraph at the top of the thread?

[thomasingalls]

Are you kidding right now? Have you seen what's happening with ICE in the US? EU countries are just one effective social media campaign cycle away from the same policies. "It can't happen here" is foolish thinking.

See also: CCP

[grey-area]

Policies are the problem here, not tools.

[dzhiurgis]

> Who is they?

You see, the government wants to control the people so they can control the government /s

[TeMPOraL]

> And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing.

Not really. Government is not Big Tech. This happens with accounts of some tech companies precisely because they're private entities setting their own rules in the still wild "wild west" of the Internet. Governments set laws and processes to ensure the things you mentioned do not happen, except in very specific circumstances.

Think of it this way: being "locked out of life completely", resulting in "no banking, no traveling, no communication", etc. is not a new problem. In the off-line world we call that being sanctioned, imprisoned, deprived of personal freedoms, etc. Yes, it happens to some people, but usually for very specific reasons (called "crimes"), after a lengthy bureaucratic process (called "trial" and "sentencing"), with plenty of safeguards to catch and rectify mistakes during and after the fact (like "legal defenses", "appeals", or even "journalists"). It is not something you normally worry about.

Humanity has worked out best practices for these thing over thousands of years of various tribes and nations and governments forming, disbanding, collapsing, emerging, conquering or becoming conquered. Adding electronic IDs on top does not change the nature of the thing. So you won't get locked out of life for posting the wrong emoji in a tax report comment; that would be like being thrown to prison for drawing something on a government form - or rather, if that's even remotely possible in your country, you have much bigger problems than digital IDs, and your best move would be to emigrate somewhere sane before borders close or civil war starts.

Plenty of other things to worry about here (e.g. ID checks suddenly being required by every business, just because it's zero effort to them for some marginal KYC benefit), but getting banned from life due to ToS violation is not one of them.

[zelphirkalt]

The worry is not, that tomorrow you will be locked out of life. The worry is, that it will happen gradually, over maybe 20, 30 years.

As always when information exists digitally and can be processed rather easily, there is a strong temptation to misuse it out of its original purpose. As always there is a high risk of information leaking at some point, especially when in the not that capable hands of big organizations and governments.

The worry is also the drift towards disabling people's IDs for even on of the things the GP listed, at some point for any reason. The one with the bank account for example seems not too unlikely. Say at some point they associate financial information with that id. Banks demand insight on this data on grounds of wanting to grant loans only to people with good history. Later on they don't even want to give you a bank account when you ask, because there is no gain in it for them, because your accounts in the past tended to not have a positive balance and maybe at some point you had solvency issues. Try getting a flat to live in without bank account. Try getting a job without bank account.

The point is, that while governments are not big tech, they are also not tiny friendly grandma Emma's village shop. There are still lots of incentives to misuse and mismanage data, while at the same time governments often do not pay competitive salaries as businesses and often attract a certain kind of people working with your data.

Also keep in mind, that so far basically every such system that was implemented in countries like Germany had severe security holes. Just read up on the "elektronische Patientenakte" for example, or the CCC and the initial eID security issues. Trust has been eroded so far, it is at level zero for the government to get such a thing done right.

[laughing_man]

In both Canada and the US we had people who were "de-banked" in recent years because the government was irritated with them. No trial. No hearing. Just a letter from the bank saying "We don't want your business anymore. Here's a cashier's check with your balance." In Canada at least some of the accounts were actually frozen. "Yes, we have your money, but no you can't have any of it."

In the US there's a requirement for banks to refuse to do business with anyone who would be a "reputational risk". I think it was intended to suppress money laundering. Anyway, when the government calls and says such and such a client represents a reputational risk, the bank doesn't have any choice.

I don't know how it works in other countries, but here in the US you'd be hard pressed to function normally in society without a credit card and bank account.

[Zak]

Being banned from life due to a TOS violation is a real concern because it's already hard to do a bunch of things without a Google or Apple account. If Google and Apple can require a government ID to create such an account, it becomes very difficult to evade a ban.

Options to get around that problem include regulating Apple and Google or mandating that essential services not require accounts with third-party providers.

[ben_w]

> Options to get around that problem include regulating Apple and Google or mandating that essential services not require accounts with third-party providers.

I would call for both of these things, for independent reasons.

All providers who get relied on in this way should need suitable regulation, even for non-essential things like supermarket loyalty cards.

Apple and Google in particular are now too heavily associated with a government hostile to the EU, therefore the EU should as a matter of urgency ensure that essential services do not require them in particular, and the surest way to do so (and make sure no shenanigans happen with mergers) would be to mandate that essential services do not require accounts with any third-party providers. Not even the postal system or a telephone number, you should always have a viable fallback to some physical office which is open at reasonable hours and is in a reasonably accessible location.

[SoftTalker]

They already do this. KYC, and similar laws. You can't open a bank account in 2026 (at least in the USA) without ID. You can't get credit, open an investment account, buy a house, vote, or be employed without an ID.

A proper digital ID would eliminate a lot of problems we now have with identity theft, having to obsessively protect names, dates of birth, SSNs in our databases (these things were not considered secrets in the pre-internet era).

Yes, we need to be vigilant about freedoms and privacy. But the idea of a government-issued ID that "proves" who you are is not new and I struggle to think of any way identity can be "proven" without a central issuing authority.

[laughing_man]

A proper digital ID would certainly make things more difficult for thieves, but if someone actually did manage to clone your ID you'd be in a world of hurt, since businesses would start to trust that ID to a greater extent than they trust anything online now.

[grey-area]

But governments would be obliged to ensure that wouldn't happen and fix it if it did. We trust them to do the same for passports etc and it works fairly well.

[laughing_man]

There's quite a bit less incentive to clone a passport, though. A guy in Pakistan can't clone my passport and use it to clean out my bank account.

[Muromec]

>The problem is what follows

Does it actually follow? It's there for 25 years in some European countries and "everyone" isn't on a government bad list dying of hunger.

[betaby]

Not sure if that sarcasm or you are serious. But yes, people have issues with access to banking in EU all the time.

[Muromec]

I heard stories about banks (mostly the app ones) closing accounts for "no reason" (there is always a reason and it's mostly quite simple), but I haven't heard stories about accounts being refused to be opened or clsoed for not having a digital id. And double so for this happening because the government put them on a list.

The government of course can put you on the list, but they don't need digital id for that. They pass a law, the regulator sends the list to all the banks and boom, you are blocked. I guess we should not have banks or not have the government too.

[abc123abc123]

This is the way.