[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.