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EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

juraj.bednar.io

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Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#201

Post by zelphirkalt »

graemep wrote: post #54
grey-area wrote: post #23

Digital ids are inevitable in my view, just as digital currency has become inescapable because it is more convenient and efficient, these ids will be issued and things like paper proofs of identity will fall away over time. Physical tokens like bank cards and driving licenses are neither necessary nor a good solution in a networked world. Our focus therefore should be controlling what governments can do with them - f…

> just as we should disallow removing citizenship. However lots of countries do allow removing citizenship In the UK it is a political decision too. Lots of countries allow locking people out of other things (e.g. freezing bank accounts). I therefore doubt we an effectively prevent this. I do not see the problem with physical tokens. They are simple, do not create a single point of failure (if I lose my phone I still…

Actually, there is a good point in this: What if I don't want to carry my phone somewhere? I shouldn't be obligated to do so. For example what if I want to go to a demo? Or I simply don't want to be location tracked for an afternoon. There needs to be a non-electronic alternative. I guess we could carry some QR codes with us, that can be scanned by police officers.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#202

Post by ben_w »

pjc50 wrote: post #198
ben_w wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't like the far right cesspool of 4chan, but can't disagree with their position that they shouldn't have to care about OFCOM. While I agree with this statement, I thought there was some kind of requirement that OFCOM goes through a process like this before being allowed to ask for a domain to be blocked in the UK? The latter is, I think, something OFCOM should be allowed to do with a restriction that it can on…

Oh, it's much more stupid than that: OFCOM can't block websites, I just checked and it's available on my phone right now. They've issued a fine to 4chan instead. Which they are ignoring. Imgur have gone the other direction: they have voluntarily blocked the UK (!), which is very irritating when trying to browse Reddit. There's certainly a process, but not a good one. (separate from all this, the Internet Watch Founda…

> OFCOM can't block websites, I just checked and it's available on my phone right now.

Until the process is complete, that's not evidence of inability, that's just the process:

  Where appropriate, if a provider fails to comply with its safety duties, we can also seek a court order for ‘business disruption measures’, such as requiring payment providers or advertisers to withdraw their services from a platform, or requiring Internet Service Providers to block a site in the UK.
- https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...

> There's certainly a process, but not a good one.

Indeed. There does seem to be a mutual non-comprehension of how the internet functions amongst lawmakers and enforcers in both the UK and the USA; both seem to act like they have more sovereignty over the internet than is possible without reaching much faster for a block order for sites outside their respective jurisdictions.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#203

Post by abc123abc123 »

grey-area wrote: post #23

Digital ids are inevitable in my view, just as digital currency has become inescapable because it is more convenient and efficient, these ids will be issued and things like paper proofs of identity will fall away over time. Physical tokens like bank cards and driving licenses are neither necessary nor a good solution in a networked world. Our focus therefore should be controlling what governments can do with them - f…

How beautifully naive. When was the last time you controlled the government? This idea, that we just trust the government to be good, and that it listens to the voters needs to die.

The government should always be assumed to be evil, and work towards complete and ultimate power. It is a cancer that spreads.

Therefore decentralization, and a private libertarian society, is the only ethical and long term sustainable society possible. Every other society, eventually collapses into authoritarianism and the burning of the jews.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#204

Post by abc123abc123 »

jdrek1 wrote: post #84
Muromec wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

This is the way.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#205

Post by abc123abc123 »

silversmith wrote: post #108
jdrek1 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#206

Post by abc123abc123 »

jcattle wrote: post #91
jdrek1 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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 com…

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.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#207

Post by silversmith »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #205
silversmith wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#208

Post by tpm »

jeroenhd wrote: post #100
tpm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The digital wallet solution is an extension to that system that will allow foreign EU citizens to authenticate themselves more easily Is there a roadmap and/or a timeframe for that? I have a Slovak ID same as the author, when will it be useful for accessing internet services?

Age verification has taken about three or four years to reach the concept stage, and that's the first stage that will be rolled out. The legal framework behind all this was released all the way back in 2014 and has been officially adopted ten years later. Officially, by December 2026, each member state must have at least one official wallet solution available for its citizens. That said, eIDAS 2.0 also mandated that,…

> I expect deadlines to be missed

My experience working on software for the German public sector sadly agrees with this assesment. Let's hope at least eventually something will work.

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#209

Post by broken-kebab »

jeroenhd wrote: post #103
broken-kebab wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can already do that in the real world. This argument stays on the sand of inadequate analogy. The way that flaw is described in the story it allows industrialization of bypassing the feature. It's huge difference with the "real world".

And unlike in the real world, there's little to no real benefit to it online. What value is there to industrializing any of this? Kids who will pay someone for their age tokens to watch porn or create social media would probably be smart enough to download a free VPN instead. Even in the very worst case scenario for the designers of this system, where large amounts of people manage to extract their tokens and hand th…

I'm not sure I understand your last para. Care to elaborate?

Re: EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

#210

Post by delusional »

coldtea wrote: post #183
schubidubiduba wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You couldn't be more wrong. There's no equal footing when propaganda buys you thousands of bots to parrot what you want on every related post. And there is no ability to "reach everyone" when intransparent algorithms decide what reaches who. Moreover, some kind of content is explicitly suppressed and censored.

All of that is still irrelevant if the people can still express themselves. The truth can rise on top of bots. The problem is the algorithm and the "explicitly suppressed and censored" and that's on the governments and corporations. So that's the worst argument for giving the government more control.

> All of that is still irrelevant if the people can still express themselves. The truth can rise on top of bots.

That argument seems easily debunked by pointing at the effectiveness of propaganda, which is in its essence indistinguishable from bots.

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