Comment by gmueckl
5 hours ago
You have the totally wrong expectations here. Some service that requires citizens to buy and bring their own devices in order to use a service will by definition always be exclusive. Whining about lacking compatibility with some niche sbowflake devices is just inappropriate in this context. The only solutiin is to require an actually convenient fallback for those otherwise excluded from that service.
The limited selection of attestation providers can be criticized for many other reasons, though.
Your disdain isn't helpinh you here either as you're just as wrong as parent.
Such public utilities ought to always prioritize privacy, platform-independence, and empowering market competion long- and short-term. And to achieve that you need to start at the design level.
In this case, clearly, you either have to avoid relying on app attestation or lay the foundation for an unrestricted number of independent chain of trust frameworks.
The latter, of course, is a policy-level issue, but the ones responsible for the design and development are the ones who need to pass such concerns up the chain.
You have the right starting point, but the wrong conclusion. Government services need to be inclusive of everybody. But you simply cannot build technical solutions that put technical requirements on devices owned by the users in a way that the service is sufficiently inclusive. That is just a fact.
If you want to be critical of the outcome on compatibility grounds, forcing a grind to increase technical compatibility is the wrong thing to ask for. That must necessarily always leave some people behind. The only honest alternative positions on that front are (a) the government issues the tech to everybody itself or (b) the government doesn't build advanced systems at all.
The German government offices rely on a lot of quaint-looking paper based processes, but they have one thing going for them: working through them can be done with pen and paper - tools that are available for cheap and broadly compatible. It's probably not such a bad thing after all?
Inclusivity is secondary here. Moreover, it's just fallacious to argue the nation has to give up on its own rights and principles and be content with whatever the market provides.