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European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple

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Re: European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple

#71

Post by pjmlp »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #15
petcat wrote: post #4

A European digital ID system that is entirely dependent on 2 US companies. Wasn't there some talk about the pressing need for European digital sovereignty recently? Or was that just performative nonsense?

Europe will never have digital sovereignty from the US. It will take 100 years and an extremely expensive, government-mandated reimplementation of every critical US tech service and company. No EU country is putting up budget for this, and no private enterprise is going to do it because building a worse version of AWS just so that it is "European" makes no financial sense and would most likely just fail anyway.

Mostly true, until reality forces otherwise, e.g. Huawei.

Re: European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple

#72

Post by uyzstvqs »

I really don't like how EUDI (OpenID4VP) works in the first place. IMO it should be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up

It should be an open standard that's local first. Government issues certificate, user loads it into any supported client app on any platform (official, open-source, Google/Apple Wallet, etc). The user should then be able to selectively share data from the certificate with third-parties, directly between the client-app and the third-party, using an open standardized protocol/format. The important challenge is that we obviously shouldn't have to share the entire certificate (which would include all data in it), there shouldn't be a static subject pubkey which creates linkability between data-shares, and obviously we'd need privacy-focused data fields like {"isover18": true} in addition to full DoB.

Re: European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple

#73

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

LoganDark wrote: post #32

Huh. This article lumps Apple in with Google when its only qualms seem to be with Google's terrible behavior. The entire article is about Google Play.

Because Apple has always been a closed platform whereas Android started out being relatively open. For Android there is an alternative to Play Integrity which would enable governments to get remote attestation assurance on non-Google Android based operating systems like GrapheneOS, but that alternative does not even exist in the Apple ecosystem.

Re: European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple

#74

Post by pjmlp »

boxed wrote: post #3

> Governments are cementing a monopoly they claim to oppose Duopoly but yea. Because there is no third alternative. Microsoft failed/gave up with Windows Phone. The people trying to fix secure government services can't really tackle that issue, but the systems needs to be built now anyway.

Windows Phone wouldn't be much help here, still an US company.

Re: European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple

#75

Post by stingraycharles »

esrauch wrote: post #62
71bw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lawsuits, sadly, won't matter. "Security" (or, rather, totalitarian control!) is more important than the 1% of nerds who care enough to tinker with their phone.

It's not 1% here though... Graphene has 300k users worldwide. There's 8 million absolutely illiterate and 150 million functionally illiterate people in Europe for comparison on scale here.

150 million functionally illiterate people in Europe? Just how is that defined?

Re: European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple

#76

Post by etiennebausson »

esrauch wrote: post #62
71bw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lawsuits, sadly, won't matter. "Security" (or, rather, totalitarian control!) is more important than the 1% of nerds who care enough to tinker with their phone.

It's not 1% here though... Graphene has 300k users worldwide. There's 8 million absolutely illiterate and 150 million functionally illiterate people in Europe for comparison on scale here.

>150 million functionally illiterate people in Europe

1/3 of the population functionally illiterate in Europe seems beyond wild to me.

Are you talking about technical illiteracy? security illiteracy?

Or do you mean they can't read english, which is a very different thing.

Re: European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple

#77

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

boxed wrote: post #3

> Governments are cementing a monopoly they claim to oppose Duopoly but yea. Because there is no third alternative. Microsoft failed/gave up with Windows Phone. The people trying to fix secure government services can't really tackle that issue, but the systems needs to be built now anyway.

There are viable third alternatives which do not require building a full smartphone stack. The national eID in Denmark, MitID, is an app "protected by" Play Integrity, but at least there are two non-smartphone alternatives available in the form of either a TOTP code generator or a FIDO2 chip which you can get for free if you can't or won't buy a smartphone.

Age verification solutions could also be built on dedicated hardware tokens, even though the tokens required to build a ZKP or blind signature based solution may not be available off the shelf right now.

Re: European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple

#79

Post by leonidasrup »

clarionbell wrote: post #18
petcat wrote: post #4

A European digital ID system that is entirely dependent on 2 US companies. Wasn't there some talk about the pressing need for European digital sovereignty recently? Or was that just performative nonsense?

Not really. EU is actually trying to decouple. But in many cases there are not any homegrown alternatives to support. There is not a single company in EU that could replace, even a considerable part, of software stack provided by Google and Apple. And, unless the regulatory environment changes., there probably never will be.

Thr answer to US tech giants are not homegrown EU tech giants, but international free software (Free as in Freedom). We already have free operating systems: Linux, BSD. Office software: LibreOffice, etc.

EU regulators have stop listening to tech company lobbyists.

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