I dunno man, I migrated to the Netherlands and our digital ID is an amazing system that literally makes my life easier anytime i need to interact with something. An open standard for the world to use for this seems like the ideal way you would want it to happen. I also personally think we are going to need some form of digital id and hopefully some sort of attribute based credential implementation à la the DECODE pro…
Can it be used without a smartphone aka "portable telescreen"? Do they explicitly guarantee this'll remain the case? If not, you're just being hoodwinked via cheap convenience.
Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
31–40 of 215 posts
Re: Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
#32I think privacy abuse can be largely prevented if a hard line is drawn saying that digital ids must only be used by the government for government services, such as voting, taxes, immigration, welfare, etc. If any private parties like banks, social media, or online stores are allowed to check your digital id, they are going to be a privacy disaster.
Re: Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not against digital ID, but I am very much against perfect law enforcement. Society evolves, and things that used to be unthinkable (eg gay marriage) slowly become acceptable. To become acceptable, however, they need to be allowed to be done, even if illegally. If you arrested every homosexual the moment they kissed someone, then homosexuality would never have become legal. Perfect enforcement leads to an ossifie…
This is the part of the argument I don’t get. A digital ID system like the one in NL is basically just a login system. It’s oauth for public services, not too different from “sign in with Google”. How does that lead to perfect law enforcement? Like, how does it prevent homosexuals from kissing? I don't mean this dismissively. I assume there is a series of steps that make sense that I’m not seeing.
* 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.
Re: Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
#34Re: Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're likely getting Oracle digital ID. The UK gov of course is going to contract it out
We don't they ask some European partners? Some have great ID systems. In The Netherlands we have DigiD, which was developed by a government organization and works very well. IIRC Estonia als has a digital identity system that works well.
Re: Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not against digital ID, but I am very much against perfect law enforcement. Society evolves, and things that used to be unthinkable (eg gay marriage) slowly become acceptable. To become acceptable, however, they need to be allowed to be done, even if illegally. If you arrested every homosexual the moment they kissed someone, then homosexuality would never have become legal. Perfect enforcement leads to an ossifie…
This is the part of the argument I don’t get. A digital ID system like the one in NL is basically just a login system. It’s oauth for public services, not too different from “sign in with Google”. How does that lead to perfect law enforcement? Like, how does it prevent homosexuals from kissing? I don't mean this dismissively. I assume there is a series of steps that make sense that I’m not seeing.
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.
Re: Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can it be used without a smartphone aka "portable telescreen"? Do they explicitly guarantee this'll remain the case? If not, you're just being hoodwinked via cheap convenience.
Everyone has a smartphone lol - i can tell that living in a country with great digital services is a lot less stressful than in country with no digitization and old school paperwork i have gone through both.
Re: Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
#38This article is written from an anarcho-socialist perspective so it may not be that persuasive to many people. In the US we don't have any official government digital ID but instead various data brokers are providing it... with no real oversight. If the people of the UK reject government digital ID they may get Palantir digital ID instead. It's not clear to me which is worse, the government playing by its own rules o…
Re: Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
#39The bouncer saying I need to see your ID always rubbed me up the wrong way, not because I objected to being challenged but because they don’t need to know who I am, they just need to see proof of age . Not even that! Proof that my age is greater than or equal to X! In a world where we would might actually see societal benefits in having people prove things about themselves*, could we not leverage technology to emit v…
Re: Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same in Denmark. It acts as a SSO for Banks, library, 2fa for debit card, hospital websites, all kinds of government services. Makes it easy, because you don't need a new or different account.
Which means the provider can track you across all those. What you spend, what you read, what medical treatment you have. All just to save carrying a wallet?
It is possible, to trust the government in other parts of world.