Digital Id – the New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance

* ID checks for social media (to protect children)

* A digital ID card, allowing ID check records to be provably linked to the original ID document (to prevent illegal working)

* The police arresting people for posting unfashionable takes on human sexuality to social media

And even if you trust the current government, there are very real fears the next government will be Trump-admiring right wing populists who are eager to upend the status quo.

The first step you need to take is view a government as a hostile entity. It's not your government, it's occupational government. It's unjust by default and you don't agree with the rules it makes, including immigration and taxes.

Now imagine there are three arms of the government -- the one that collects taxes, the one that administers unemployment benefits and the other, which gives out visa, including family reunification permits.

You, as natural born citizen want to bring another person from the outside as a partner and for that you need to sponsor their visa. Government in their infinite wisdom decided you need to earn a certain amount of income for a certain time to be able to sponsor a partner (otherwise you both will be able to claim benefits). To do so you get a list of unemployment premiums paid from one agency and submit to the other.

Now here is the kicker -- if the government is able to aggregate the data from all the agencies mentioned above, they can better implement their policy, i.e. deny you family reunification visa AND bust your for not paying taxes. To aggregate the data they need to have the primary key to join datasets, including data sets from the governments from other countries (see CRS).

In this imaginary situation you can get your partner a visa and immediately stop working. If the government is able to join datasets, something will automatically trigger and you will get the letter saying visa is revoked.

You can disagree or agree with any specific policy, or you can deny government the capability to implement privacy invading policies.

Think of it as a backslash against tracking by google on all the sites with ad sense, algorithmic feeds and the rest. Maybe gestapo is not sending you gulash tomorrow, but it's symptomatically not great.

Add:

Can the government ask Palantir to join datasets without the primary key? Sure they can and they do, that goes against the same principle as above. Is it better to have civil freedoms and privacy protection that come from literally doing Holocaust? It's better, but it's not on menu yet.

Perhaps your digital ID is needed to open a bank account, get a phone number, sign up for insurance, etc. Now, suppose some fascist government comes into power. They could start cancelling the digital ID's of people or groups they do not like or are bigotted against. These people start losing access to critical infrastructure.

Now, this could already happen, even with imperfect paper IDs, of course. But by making everything digital, we are reducing societal resilience towards such kind of hostility.

The ID checks in the UK are an example of something I'm against.

If physical ID gets heavily discouraged and Digital ID gets mandated for everything, you basically have to keep a tracking device(a phone, which already fulfills that role) that is now tied to government records. Location, who do you meet, your contacts, when do you access your bank etc - all of that can be exposed extremely easily. The ease of access is the problem - as normally law enforcement needs to go through lengthy process to access such data across multiple vendors - but now all it takes is just storing metadata about access to Id Portal, and can do so in bulk.

Now they have it in single place - and in most cases - no code is open source, with no way to verify if it even does what it promised to even if it was open source.

The issue is that even if you have 100% trust in current government, you are one election away from a change to something vastly different. Always ask yourself this question when a law is proposed:

- would I be fine with this legislation if the government in charge represented everything I hate?

Are you saying that it's 100% garanteed optional in all situations? It has no power to be used to control or even coerce you or discriminate against you or build a profile and track you which can be used at a later date by a different party when a new political wind decides it finds you inconvenient? I find all of that hard to believe while still performing the convenience function let alone any legitimate law enforcement function.

In many cases, they looked at the census records; something that most western nations have today anyway.

Let's be real: if your government decides to slaughter an entire class of people in its own borders, there's nothing you as a citizen can do except flee and hope to get out without being caught (or sent back).

It is possible, to trust the government in other parts of world.

I can't say if there are backdoors in place for them to log in, and if that is (currently) legal.

Hospitals and libraries are government run, I would assume even if they had their own login, they could manage to snoop the data, no?

These are all online service. So it's not even a wallet argument. But we recently got digital drivers license, which can be used in the "real" world. That is one card less you need to carry around. Only in DK and only for DK citizens though.

There's other issues (UX, privacy to the 3rd parties) and further improvements here coming with better wallets (EU-wide) soon, but even today it's absolutely possible to have digital id that doesn't tell the government every time you use it.

> i can tell that living in a country with great digital services is a lot less stressful

For everyone who deserves to participate in society?

If the ID becomes about more than proving right to work, and becomes a daily carry, it's not hard to see the appeal of a government down the line tapping into an always on-hand microphone, GPS, internet enabled device.

Even putting the tin foil hat aside, I and many people like me enjoy leaving the phone at home, and want as little time spent on the thing as possible.

Last year they removed the ability to register[0] yubikey FIDO2 tokens affected by the EUCLEAK 'vulnerability', despite it not posing any security risk even by their own admission, and nobody seems to have cared. The whole thing screams security theater, they require the much more expensive FIDO2 Level 2 keys for no reason (which limited you to just Trustkeys at the time after yubikeys got banned) while their own sites crashes[1] if you give it a secure password.

At the end of the day, if not it's required by law the only other guarantee you have is a broad userbase that will complain if it's taken away and at least at the moment it's clear that no such userbase exists.

[0] https://www.a-trust.at/de/%C3%BCber_uns/newsbereich/20240905...

[1] https://imgur.com/a/Uyjaoa7

If anything, there's really a big advantage to it for the banks - most locals already have banking, immigrants are the one market where you can get new customers without having to push them past the effort/laziness of switching from their existing setup.

If you don’t have a passport, for instance, it’s much harder for a UK citizen to prove their right to work in the UK, for which your employer is liable if they get it wrong.

So please, tell me again how having a clear proof of identity tied to your right to work, and other things, will “not change anything.”

The fact that the system is not 100% consistent 100% of the time is a feature, not a bug.

A savings account you don't need proof of address but I think most will ask for your NI (social security) number. Some will send snail mail to the address you provide to enable withdrawals.

Also, once you go beyond very basic services you might discover digid only works if you are a citizen. Otherwise you are back to papers.

If people got off the internet they might realise they have all the tools needed to make their country a better place.

You don't need to keep Europsplaining to Brits. We aren't all idiots. We know you have ID cards etc and we know about Estonia.

Also if we reject one your ideas, it's not always because we misunderstood it - we can understand it AND think it's a bad idea. I know that often hurts the egos of Germans, the French and the Dutch ;(!

It's funny because it's often Europeans not understanding British politics...the irony ;)