Comment by ciarannolan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ciarannolan | Hacker News Reader

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> Good grief I have no idea why these debates always descend into alarmism and philosophizing. Virtually every democratic country on this planet has national id cards. Switzerland, a bastion of democracy does, Israel does, South Korea does, Germany, does, if you emigrate from the UK to Switzerland, does anyone feel they've now entered a fundamentally new relationship with the state because of an ID card?

What is your argument here? A lot of countries do it, therefore it's okay?

> If you buy booze online in Germany on Amazon you can type in your ID and your age is verified within a minute, and the standard actually demands that those requests are ephemeral. Can anyone tell me why that's worse than some patchwork of private verification industries who leak your data every two months or sell them to god knows who?

Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs?

> Does anyone seriously think not having an ID card stops the government from unifying data?

Absolutely.

>What is your argument here? A lot of countries do it, therefore it's okay?

no, therefore it doesn't meaningfully change the relationship to the state, unless one agrees that those countries are somehow qualitatively different than the UK or before they had IDs. The author tries to appeal to fear and is being dramatic. Arguments along the lines of "this will fundamentally change X" are just rhetoric to use people's scepticism of change. It's the same kind of thing you see in US politics when some politician goes "and they'll take your freedoms, and your meat, and your guns" regardless of what the actual legislation says

>Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs?

because when I order something online there's not necessarily anyone there to look at it with their eyeballs, and to be honest I trust an (ideally open) algorithm more than a random person. Just a year ago[1] a cop was caught sniffing around in a database and stalking women under the guise of police business. So if you ask me, eliminating people from data processing is a feature.

[1]https://gizmodo.com/cop-uses-police-database-to-creep-on-ove...

>because when I order something online there's not necessarily anyone there to look at it with their eyeballs

Isn't that problematic because all Timmy has to do get his hands on booze is to lay his eyes on someone's ID? I don't see how the scheme is any more secure than validating the order wasn't placed with a prepaid credit card (presumably only adults have access to non-prepaid credit cards). It makes much more sense to do the verification on delivery, rather than when you're placing the order.

It's not that easy. To use someone's electronic ID as verification you either need their ID card and their ID pin code and probably access to their computer as well or mobile phone (+ access to it) and their ID pin code.

> Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs?

For one, it doesn’t scale. The average sales clerk is not qualified to correctly identify a valid ID. IIRC it takes about three months of training for someone to be able to do that, it also requires time and tools (at least a magnifying glass and an UV light).

> Absolutely

Would you please give some substance to your message?

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