Comment by fyredge
3 days ago
This sounds like an unreasonable amount of distrust in a government. If a government is truly malicious, it no longer matters if an ID was issued in the first place.
Take the current US administration. If they were to point the finger at a user for something the government didn't like, I doubt many people will agree, and more likely people will be opposed to the government than the user. The most important thing is to prevent government from abusing violence on the people for speaking up, which is somewhat lacking in the US.
More effort should be done to hold governments accountable, not finding ways to skirt around it.
It doesn't even have to be malicious. The UK government had the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal where it lost the only identity documents of thousands of people, and also tried to remove them from the UK for not having these documents.
Governments shouldn't work like Google's technical support, where they are in 100% control and you have zero recourse if they don't like you, or even if they just fuck up. Governments should be accountable to their people, there need to be systems (like courts) to rein in the government's unlawful actions. It goes without saying that government shouldn't build fully centralised systems of authority, and certainly shouldn't be implicitly trusted by third parties - because when they do that, things go badly for the citizens of that government. Or citizens of other countries (see e.g. the USA fucking with ICC staff)
...and yet here we are, discussing systems that would lock people out of all sorts of things if they won't or can't get a trusted proof they're in a central database we trust the custodians of 100% - those custodians never make mistakes or abuse their position, right? Why the rush to adopt the more fragile system?
What I worry about is more and more "nudge theory" or dark patterns coming in; you may be entitled to something, or have rights, and the government doesn't like people having that, or paying for people to have it. They won't say "no, people can't have these rights and entitlements" and take the hit at the ballot box (though sometime they do and that is strictly worse), but they will deliberately put in roadblocks and gotchas (digital or otherwise) that oh-so-unfortunately sometimes don't work, or are cumbersome and thus discourage people from exercising their rights.
Point taken on incompetence as opposed to maliciousness. I'm not gung ho on a central database. Perhaps issuing a physical ID, similar to driving license would suffice? And if we want to prevent having tech corps scanning your face, just make it a pin locked card, ala bank cards. Social media isn't a human right anyways.