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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if we will dispense with the need for ID. Imagine borders where no passport is needed or ATM machines that just take a quick iris scan instead of a physical card. Or other emergency services such as hospitals able to check if you can pay the bills or have the required citizenship. I don't think that the crowd that have store loyalty cards would complain if CCTV rather than the card applied the perks.

In such a brave new world identity theft would be a thing of the past and everyone would have less theft to worry about. So there could be upsides for law abiding consumers and not just fascist government police forces.

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From my understanding, one of the tricky bits of biometrics as passwords in general is that you can't really change them. What happens when the future's equivalent of an ATM skimmer scans your iris?

Could also lead to increased violence in muggings/robberies, etc. If fingerprints or eyes become necessary to access what it is they want to take, they'll just add those to the list of things to take from you.

>one of the tricky bits of biometrics as passwords

Serious question, would a passport be considered a password in this context?

>ATM skimmer scans your iris

Your credit card is authentication but your PIN is authorization. I imagine your iris will replace your card, not your PIN.

The difference between authentication and authorization can be confusing in some real world examples.

Interesting point re: authentication vs. authorization. In the situation of an iris scan as authentication, what then becomes the authorization? Multi-factor biometrics, some sort of 2/3/4fa scan?

Broadly speaking, solutions to that problem which involve more biometric data make me uncomfortable, in no small part because I just don't trust the people who operate the systems.

Don't know on the passport thing, although my gut says no. Do you mean people just having a passport in general, so say an iris scan pulls your passport data & cross references it against a camera at the ATM? Or having it physically on you so its RFID chip is read?

I've just started thinking/learning about these sorts of problems, so as of now I don't have many opinions on how things should be done haha.

It's something you have which also represents something you are. A password is something you know.

> Or other emergency services such as hospitals able to check if you can pay the bills

Hospitals are required to provide emergency services regardless of whether you can pay the bills. Pausing for even a second to check a patient's ability to pay when their life is on the line would be heinous in my opinion.

Have you been to a hospital ER? Unless you are literally dying, you will be sat in a chair and handed a clipboard of papers to fill out before anyone with medical training looks at you. And one of those forms will be a financial agreement.

And? You'll fill it out, possibly lying, possibly not, and hand it back to them. They will not read it, they will serve you, and then they will attempt to get payment from you at some point in the future.

Yes, that's USA.

Not to derail this conversation, but I'm so happy I live in Canada. I don't understand why the US population is so vehemently against public healthcare.

Ditto Norway and UK.

Mostly because there isn't a well intentioned government program in the US that actually runs as it's supposed to, isn't abused, isn't bloated, ever shrinks in costs or gains efficiency, etc.

And I can't leave a comment like that without addressing the inevitable reply about the current state of healthcare, so to clarify, the current state of healthcare in the US is also the fault of the federal government for a bevy of reasons - most notably, incentivizing workplace health insurance that removed insurance coverage from the consumer market entirely, removing its costs and the natural market response to them and simultaneously removing the cost of healthcare itself from that same marketplace.

The federal government has what I like to call a financial firehose that it aims at different problems and every time it aims that firehose, things get worse. Whether we are talking about healthcare, farming, higher education or housing...everything just gets more bloated and expensive when you remove price from discouraging demand in the basic economics of supply and demand.

I've been to the ER a few times. When you show up, they hand you a clipboard full of papers. When you show up saying "I think I'm having a heart attack", they take you straight back.

That's a good point, there are many positive benefits to such a system. Unfortunately, men are not angels and governments tend to abuse such power (this is partly the reason I don't complain too much about oudated government inefficiency - I don't necessarily mind if the government is slow and clogged.)

> or have the required citizenship.

Thank you but no, thank you.

It is my (and not just mine) opinion that law abiding citizens who also care for their own health should push for free healthcare for everyone. If anything, at least until bacteria and viruses learn to properly tell "good" and "bad" people apart.

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