Comment by PoignardAzur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PoignardAzur | Hacker News Reader

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> This seems a trivial and no-brainer and yet you will be surprised how many Americans will be simply denied this sort of service after birth

The whole "centralized ID means your government will oppress minorities" narrative seems like a mostly american concept.

I imagine part of it is due with the US's particularly bad history with minorities, and part of it is a general defiance against any kind of centralization that also seems kind of unique to american culture.

Speaking as someone living in a country (France) that has had centralized ID for decades, it feels really weird to see people describing what a dystopian future American would become if it did that thing we do right now.

(and yes, ID card checks are used as an excuse for racial profiling; and the lack of an ID card is used to track down undocumented immigrants, and that's bad; but it's a symptom of other problems, and it's nowhere as bad as "centralized = black people are denied access to social services")

It's odd how we talk about something like centralized identification without the other areas of privacy limiting changes we are experiencing. Online we are tracked, logged and categorized like no other time in history. Even the basic means of conducting a business transaction leaves a digital trail whether it's a wire transfer, credit card transaction or bitcoin payment.

Authoritarian countries have combined a cashless society with 24/7 surveillance of all kinds to create a black mirror style social credit system.

None of this would be possible without first having a form of centralized identity. This will likely be coming soon to a democracy near you due to the level of state control it invites. Someone needs to get working on an ad blocker we can use in real life. I suspect it will be built around aluminum foil.

The only difference is that your identity could be disambiguated with one data point instead of three or four. I don’t see how that has any bearing on the functional aspect of any such hypothetical dystopia.

We can very well have laws that restrict what ID can be required for - so it would be illegal to ask for ID for certain things (you shouldn't be required to present your ID to buy groceries for example).

But for things where requiring an ID is already accepted (banking, etc) or inherently necessary (interacting with the government, like filing taxes), a robust, digital ID system would be much better than a paper-based system vulnerable to fraud and human error.

> mostly american concept

True. It is an American experience.

Different admins have harassed different Americans at different points in time. Jews, Blacks, Chinese, Indians (India) and so on. Donald Trump showed us just how much evil US admin can get on matters of paperwork. Since he could not legally stop legal immigrants from working, he changed rules and created such a long backlog that it takes now 24 months to renew some work permits which use to take 15 days 4 years ago. Immigrants were deeply hurt. He also adopted several tactics which can be called "voter suppression". He used ridiculous logic such as "extreme vetting" to deny visa approvals for 4 year old children of an already approved immigrant.

Trump admin harassed a lot of Hispanics born in border towns of USA, refusing to use their birth certificates as evidence of citizenship.

>it feels really weird to see people describing what a dystopian future American would become if it did that thing we do right now.

USA is much much larger and far diverse than France. It also does not have the groups who hate each other as Americans have. I highly doubt if there are any French politicians who bear certain hatred for specific groups.

I am not at all denying that centralized IDs are bad for everyone, but for Americans it is going to be pretty bad.

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