Comment by broken-kebab
14 hours ago
I guess history made us different. Personally I have reasons to be equally distrustful to anyone who wants to know too much about me, but much more afraid of my gov't than overseas entities.
14 hours ago
I guess history made us different. Personally I have reasons to be equally distrustful to anyone who wants to know too much about me, but much more afraid of my gov't than overseas entities.
In this specific case, why fear the government?
My government has already seen my government-issued ID. If my government hasn't worked out my phone number, they can always ask the phone company. My address is required for the ID, voting, and filing taxes. I don't see how the government learns anything from this?
Conversely, I would like to believe most companies do not have my government-issued ID, nor a lot of the information on it.
In this specific case your government can ban you from the web by refusing to verify. E.g. to punish dissidents abroad Belarusian dictatorship simply nullifies their IDs, and lists them as terrorists in public data. Apparently that's enough to ruin somebody's life worldwide. But at least they can use their browsers, which would be not that easy in a world where gov't-backed verification is norm on the net.
From an American perspective, i don't trust the government with the implementation details, nor do I trust our political climate, misaligned incentives, and general disinterest in good governance to implement something so sensitive.
If I lived in say, Sweden, I feel much more comfortable trusting their government to implement. In America, I feel I must always vote in a way that prevents giving any power to the government that I wouldn't want my political opponents to have over me.
In said US of America, when the government wants to know something about you, they will get everything they want from the companies - it's even written clearly in the US laws. So I'm not sure why (or where) you draw that line...
2 replies →
the grass is always greener on the other side
> My government has already seen my government-issued ID.
If you have a government ID and all you use it for is voting and paying taxes, then they know that you vote and you pay taxes.
If you have to use it for accessing the internet then they know everything you do on the internet. What you read, who you talk to, what you post, when you sleep, where you are at any given time -- it's very much not the same thing as just having a picture of you and your name.
No they do not. A properly designed government app that uses cryptography to generate a deniable token that can't be cross-correlated but proves your humanity/age to a consuming site is manifestly different than Google adtech hoovering up as much of your activity as possible.
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