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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

Too bad the rest of the EU doesn't live in Estonia, it would have made GDPR much better.

In my country (Oz) we had a referendum a few decades back about a national ID card, which failed to pass. I for one am against any form of centralised ID system. The basic premise (of the time) was, "if you want to know me, here I am". The government department of Birth, Deaths and Marriages goes to some lengths to ensure that these 3 things are not tied to any one number. Ironically, the government got what it wanted when it introduced a Tax File Number and has bled into some other systems like banking, but thankfully it's not as bad as the U.S's SSN.

I seem to recall reading here on HN a few weeks back how surnames came into existence: it was because the (? Italian) government wanted to track taxes. Before that everyone had several ways of naming themselves: John, John son of Joe, John of someplace, John the carpenter, etc. Personally, I really like that because I'm not just "one thing", but am a person who has different aspects.

You reap what you sow unfortunately. The fact is that the government still keeps track of you but you just have a boatload of downsides by not having a proper system citizens can use.

Any centralized identity system solves a problem we don't have. It doesn't simply serve to identify a person. It serves to aggregate an identity and tie together extremely disparate and unrelated data. It enables a data leak or abuse to not just compromise one service, but all of them at once. If there is a leak of data from, say, a dating site that involves dumping the public keys of the users alongside the user activity associated with it, then the credit card company and electric company and water company and the gaming forum you signed up for and multitudes of other utterly unrelated organizations now have the ability to correlate your dating activity with your activity on their service. The identities on all of those separate systems being the same identity is the problem a centralized system solves. And it's a problem we have never had.

> Any centralized identity system solves a problem we don't have.

You already have one, SSN and similar absolutely count and allow aggregate different data. Not to mention that you're absolutely forgetting about the fact that humans don't have a lot of entropy, k-anonymous data is not what we have by-default. You are wrong about a centralized system "providing a way to aggregate data" it just makes it easier. I live in a country that actually gives citizens access to a centralized identity system and I'd say it has solved much more than you're giving credit for.

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