Comment by Grombobulous
5 days ago
Which services are inaccessible? List them out.
Sure, yeah, I need the App Store to access the Tolls NY EZ Pass app. But I don’t need the EZ Pass app to manage my account or pay a toll, and I don’t even need EZ Pass itself to pay a toll. This government service is an optional convenience.
Again with slippery slope doomer mentality we can list out any future hypothetical and apply this “wake up” messaging.
The state makes me get a drivers license to drive a car, wake up sheeple, pretty soon they’re going to make you get a license to walk down the sidewalk. Just because it hasn’t happened yet and there’s no pending legislation or political appetite for that idea doesn’t mean we are safe, we have to fight this now before it’s too late!
We've been sliding down the privacy slope for my entire life. Literally every single year is worse than the one before it. At what point does one engage their brain and realize that incessantly repeating "slippery slope! slippery slope fallacy!" does not, in fact, stop them from sliding down the slope? It's not a fucking fallacy when you're on one.
> Which services are inaccessible?
I'm aware of a handful of French services based on France's already existing, Google/Apple required national identity service. Strictly speaking EUDI isn't live until 2027, but there is not a single reason to believe it will end in any other result. Even if you've drank from the spring of eternal naivety, surely there must be a limit to how much good faith you can have in how much your government values your privacy? Maybe you could point me to the source of this blissful ability to close your eyes and ignore everything happening around you?
Now we are heading into a completely different topic. We were talking about the availability of government services, not privacy.
You have not listed a specific French service. I suspect if you did I’d then be able to look it up and find out that there’s a non-digital alternative available, and that putting stuff on the App Store and Google Play is just the government meeting their constituents where they are.
Despite your accusations, I’m not naive about governments that want to clamp down on their citizens’ privacy and freedoms, but at the same time I don’t really think the more mundane government services tend to work this way. I think they’re choosing the technology available to them out of pragmatism. They need to put their services on something that is widely adopted and meets their technical needs. E.g., if the government wants to take payments for vehicle registrations with a credit card, there is no real way around going through Visa/Mastercard. It’s not like they’re doing that as some kind of conspiracy theory anti-privacy scheme.
> We were talking about the availability of government services, not privacy.
Sure. The government services are available to you if you get your nice little American phone and give them your data and aren't sanctioned.
https://www.moncompteformation.gouv.fr/espace-public/je-ne-r...
Yeah, yeah, there's a non-digital alternative available. Just wait an additional four weeks like a second-class citizen. That's totally a reasonable thing to make anyone do and not de facto requiring a duopoly device.
> I think they’re choosing the technology available to them out of pragmatism.
Does this distinction matter? I didn't make any kind of accusations of conspiracy theories. Convenience is enough. Depending on the US duopoly is more convenient than either digital sovereignty or privacy, so you get neither of those things.
The EUDI already compromised its idealistic words on paper. It was meant to be platform agnostic. That died the moment it came time to implement it, because it was more convenient to only support Apple/Google phones. And when the majority of citizens are using it, it becomes more convenient to support only it rather than offering multiple alternatives. Thus, without any malice aforethought, your entire union becomes dependent on and subservient to the US, and the legislation mandating businesses support EUDI is, even if unintentionally, a killing blow to any attempt to escape the status quo. The purpose of a system is what it does[1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
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