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Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a more accurate metaphore would be "Internet Passport". Government's can't take it away and it has no real entitlements. However Jeff Atwood is from the USA which has a strangley low number of passport holders. Perhaps they are used to using a driving licence instead of passport as general ID.

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Perhaps they are used to using a driving licence instead of passport as general ID.

No perhaps about it. It seems to the average American, the word "drivers license" evokes "proof of identity" first and "proof of ability to drive a car" second, because they're using theirs as a general ID more often than for its original purpose.

It gets even funnier when American companies operate abroad and require "two photo IDs" in countries where everyone has a government-provided ID card.

It seems to the average American, the word "drivers license" evokes "proof of identity" first and "proof of ability to drive a car" second, because they're using theirs as a general ID more often than for its original purpose.

This is because the idea of a National ID Card is for some strange reason (strange to this American, I mean) seen as an evil thing by the general public here.

What the hell is a social security card if not a national ID card. Unique number assigned to each american citizen and you are forced to have it.

I (and most others that I know) don't carry a social security card. There's virtually no need for it in daily life. If you even know where yours is, it's probably sitting next to your birth certificate in a drawer.

But we all know our number by memory.

> But we all know our number by memory.

I don't. And I use my passport as an ID when two forms of ID is required.

There's enough circumstances where you can be forced to surrender passports though, and certainly historically they weren't automatically available. I understand British passports were, in the late 19th Century, only available to people who the foreign secretary personally knew or was linked very closely to, with the net effect that many British instead obtained French passports because they didn't require you to be a French national, were easier to get hold of and worked equally well.

I thought I could remember reading somewhere that passports weren't used that much during Victorian times - this article seems to explain why:

http://www.wanderlust.co.uk/magazine/articles/destinations/a...

Apparently rail travel made the whole process of issuing and checking passports a bit of a pain so most countries just gave up - they didn't become common again until 1914.

> However Jeff Atwood is from the USA which has a strangley low number of passport holders.

It's not strangely low; Americans can travel to far more than the equivalent of the EU without one. (We can go to all 50 plus Canada and Mexico.)

I am under the impression that we can no longer go to Canada without a passport.

Edit: Since June 2009.

You can't go to Mexico without a passport either. You can't come back without one, anyway.

The US Gov does now issue passport cards which are a form of national ID card that allows citizens back in at international LAND borders. You should ask for one when you apply for your passport; they're nice to carry in your pocket when you're abroad and the full passport is safely locked away.

This notion of equivalence is a very interesting concept.

The US is is geographically larger than Europe, has a comparable number of people, and is arguably as diverse.

Yes, it looks like we speak the same language, but the diversity in "American" is at least as broad as the difference between the middle of "American" and "received English". (Yes, I'm aware that there's a lot of diversity in UK English.)

Yes, Americans mostly watch the same TV, but our exports and castoffs are not unknown in Europe.

America is not as lingusitically diverse as Europe. The difference between 2 American english accents might be similar to the difference between 2 English accents, but there are dozens of languages in europe. You're comparing the whole of the US to one part of EU.

If memory serves, if you don't have a passport you can go to Mexico, you just can't get back into the U.S.

I imagine this is why Microsoft's Live ID was originally called Passport.

I think the point is that few people carry their passport around with them on a day to day basis even in countries where they are very common.

I've lived in the UK and Oz and in both countries my drivers license stays in my wallet ready for when an over eager bouncer to ask me to prove my age or for when I sign up to a new video store on a whim. My passport pretty much stays at home unless I'm going to the airport.

Why we can't just call it "Internet Identity?"

Didn't Microsoft have a product by that name? :)

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