EU set to unveil plans for bloc-wide digital wallet for various services
reuters.com
reuters.com
But in term of privacy and surveillance society, this will be a nightmare...
Imagine, the dream for all eu gov and tax/police forces to have a mandatory unified controlled system for identification anywhere. From there, it will be more easier to go one step further in surveillance for average citizen.
The thing is that currently, the multitude of not centralized, authenticated system allows to remain anonymous or quasi anonymous for a lot of things. But, once there will be an official guaranteed EU identity authentication system, everyone will want to use it.
You are visiting a city, and you need to pay the parking fee? the EU SSO will have to be used, and states will be able to know where you were, at what time.
You want to access a website that is required by law to do age verification? EU SSO has to be used and again, the state can monitor your internet browsing.
You buy/sell a few things online, on peer to peer website like "leboncoin" or "ebay"? or do car sharing on "blablacar"? Mandatory EU SSO id has to be used, and so everything you do can be monitored.
Why wouldn't they? Think about it. If people's real identities are involved then they're less likely to be abusive, because everything tracks back to them. But it also means that websites like Facebook and pornhub might not let new users in without that kind of authentication.
new technology is like the wild west for govts and corporations, and you can hold a larger crowd hostage with a gun than you can with a knife.
For example, the German government assumes that every resident has a fixed, official, registered address. However for various reasons, many people can't register their address. They might for instance live in an illegal sublet. Since they can't register, they can't get a tax ID, health insurance or a bank account, which in turn make it hard to get an apartment that lets them register.
Lawmakers often forget that millions of people aren't born into the system, and do not always fill certain preconditions like the native population.
In the UK you have the 1953 Births and Deaths Registration Act requires a birth to be registered within 42 days of a child being born.
Also nice example that Google spat out here in the respect of the UK and trying to opt out not registering a birth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jun/23/man-refused-...
So given that, I'd say birth certificates have in many ways and thru various avenues of law in one country or another, kinda become mandatory years ago.
It also affects Germans, but to a lesser extent since they register at their parents' house.
That should be quoted and hanging upon the wall of every politician. Very easy to fall thru the net and undue social and mental stress trying to fix that when innocent and a local, dare imagine the nightmare of somebody less fortunate who just wants to have an honest life.
The aspect that Germany have a clear approach to dealing with those who they deem illegal, it clearly does not help those who fall into that definition without doing anything illegal. Rent the wrong place and suddenly the burden and fallout is placed upon the renter who becomes a victim of the process.
This isn't isolated to Germany, and the same thing patterns out in every country in one form or another.
I was at first perplexed when reading all the different requirements; it was hard trying to understand how to first approach 'the problem' to satisfy the circular dependencies in the requirements.
Thankfully, there was a lot of hand-holding involved between the HR department, the landlady (through a realtor), and the immigrant-friendly bank in order to allow us to bend the rules to solve the chicken/egg dilemma of residence/banking/insurance.
For non-state actors. Government(s) will obviously get exemptions in ways we won't find out until later. Look at GDPR and the EU commission.
The GDPR does apply to governments in general (see Article 2) but criminal law enforcement authorities are exempt.
All police-like institutions will likely have full access right from the beginning, because of child pornography, terror or other "serious crimes".
That will be softened and weakened by the time until someone finds out this system was misused for stalking some VIP or because police wanted to catch a guy who had 10 grams of weed.
It's all happened before, it will happen again.
These digital wallets and digital currency systems will just be used to enforce taxation.
Meanwhile, where do all those taxes go? To the welfare state (ie. pensions and healthcare for baby boomers), and to maintain the bureaucracy.
I don't really think that is the case.
There was a big scandale in Denmark a couple of years [1]. Where a tabloid had bribed a person at Nets which is the main digital payment processing solutions in Denmark. As a result they could set up trackers on people whenever they used their credit card. Tracking where the went on honeymoon or had dinner etc.
If a second-rate tabloid can end up tracking individuals' people use of their credit cards. I'm pretty sure it should be manageable for most governments _if they want to_.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Se_og_H%C3%B8r_media_scan...
It is a service that will allow say a Dane to use Danish NemID instead of a Swedish bankid when working in Sweden.
And it is not for monitoring you. It is for authenticating you in a manner that is explicitly under your control.
They are logged, and law enforcement does get the logs on request.
Read the ToS.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-creates-its-own-digital-c...
That applies to uses inside China and outside China. I can see the NSA/USA wanting to do the same, as well as all the other countries in the world. This might be what actually kills all cryptocurrencies unless it becomes mandated that all citizens use it, which could lead to many outside a country having to also use it. But maybe there will be ways to scramble the tracking? Or maybe not, anyone looked at the design of China's cryptocurrency?
I'd say this should be left to the national Governments.
Such a service would be useful for me for example: a french living in Belgium with relatives in Greece.
[1] https://www.thelocal.se/20210510/my-first-visit-to-the-swedi...
But really this just makes me sad that cash is going away. It provided some ways to work around the system, but with so few people accepting it, you're just kind of the mercy of the bureaucracy. And good luck ever convincing common Swedes it's an issue when they've always lived in the system. They only see it as something that works so well, when it is basically broken for all newcomers.
The "itsme" SSO app is even worse. You can't use it without using an iOS or Android smartphone (and even then it probably won't work if it's rooted). And it's got this really weird requirements of being secured by a 5-digit pin (no more, no less last I checked..).
The itsme app works totally fine for me, and my less tech-literate family members. It strikes a good balance in UX and security.
All in all, I think that the Belgian government is doing a good job in this. It needs to work well for the average user, which it does! I don't expect my government to spend time and money to support all fringe cases like smartphones that don't run iOS or Android.
I expect my government to create solutions that work for everyone. Including "fringe cases". Including people in poverty. The marginalised. The contrarians. The smartphoneless. Everyone.
Edit: and I especially expect them not to further the de-facto duopoly of Google & Apple.
The software stack is pretty much standardized. I am a bit worried about aarch64 platforms, but hopefully they will also be supported.
OTOH, the itsme application is a huge security issue aside of being a serious vendor lock-in over passwords, 2FA and OTP. It is tivoising logins like OKTA, except that here, it is mandated by the state.
The german eID (and bank cards) already contain a way to sign whether or not the holder of the card is >16 or >18 without revealing anything else (e.g. for cash-payment at cigarette dispenser machines)
Similar functionality being available in a unified way across the whole bloc is something few other countries have done yet and would drive innovation
So you'd have support for France, Germany, maybe Netherlands, and that's it.
With an EU-wide ID, the smaller countries profit significantly, and startups can integrate and use the functionality easier.
To facilitate freedom of movement within the bloc.
Spottify advertised itself in EU for half a decade or more, but has been available in my country for less than a year.
Currently, moving to another member state would require multiple steps to getting access to eID services in that country. Such as requesting (and pay for) a conventional national ID, in order to set up an eID that can be used for banking and identification in that country alone.
I'll add that my experience is based on moving within EU in the Nordics, which historically promote seamless free movement between those countries that often exceed the goals set by the EU.
Because we can is not a reason. This is the same reason we have global warming. We can build gas burning cars, so we should, without thinking of the consequences.
Of what use is eID, when no one can secure anything network connected? When all eID will be subverted, stolen, misused, making the same useless? And meanwhile, causing endless misery for those experiencing the loss of privacy, the consequences of identity theft, abuse by foreign powers, and more.
On top of this, I absolutely don't need it easier for a state to track me. Now every time I show my eID, the state gets pinged to validate it?
No thanks!
Thats escalated quickly...
"he loss of privacy, the consequences of identity theft, abuse"
You are like 15 years late to the party, you can easilly buy/scrape/find enough information to get credutcards in sone poor sucker's name from the facebook and experian data leaks.
Besides, it's not only for intra-EU Digital Nomads but also for business operations beyond national borders; reducing the overhead improves accessibility from the less developed countries to richer markets.
Ever.
If you have not been hacked when specifically targeted, it only means your data is not worth the cost/profit. Pre-zero days abound, firewalls will be bypassed, and worst?
People will be bribed, coerced, scammed, tricked.
There are only two options:
1.. Absolutely zero Internet access for anyone working on said computers. No mobile phones allowed in the building, no machine with internet access in the building, faraday cage around the entire building, etc...
Yes, no email.
Nothing.
2. Paper
And of course, the above with physical access controls, and scans / searches.
The real fix for all identity theft, is to make it a crime, and a serious one, including mandatory jail time for all CxO level execs (on the premise of gross negligence) for obtaining any data on individuals via illicit means.
And that has to be world wide.
In the US, it's normal for people to move to a different state to attend university, and then from there often to a different state again. Something like 1% to 2% move each year to a different state [0], which means in 10 years more than 10% of people will have done that. Some cross state borders multiple times in their lives. This is what we want to achieve, because it fuels economic growth and removes obstacles to happiness. (It's also, in a way, a restoration of what we had pre-Nation-State, when people were basically free to settle anywhere they wanted; but that's beside the point). Making the process of moving across the continent as smooth as possible is a Good Thing.
I would also move a point on terminology:
> working in a different EU country than their own
People don't own countries, they are born into them. (This is not just a pedantic remark - I think it's important that we move on from XIX-century nationalistic terminology if we want to achieve progress.)
[0] https://www.mymovingreviews.com/move/how-often-and-why-ameri...
It doesn't really succeed as a pedantic remark, because 'their own' doesn't denote ownership. For example, here is a sentence in a BBC news article that I found by googling:
"Even his own boss said Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter at the heart of the Hutton Inquiry, 'paints in primary colours rather than something more subtle'".
This sentence does not suggest that Andrew Gilligan owns his boss.
European Union is not a federal government like the USA but a union of independent countries.
In Europe it’s normal to live your entire life in the country you were born. Of course you can move wherever you want whenever you want but it’s never needed because there is 99% odds that your state have what you need (specific university, companies offices …)
Since Europe have really poor democratic control and power structure as of today, we are far from a federal Europe.
Even European policies like RGPD are always enforced locally at country level, there is no such thing as European government.
I don't agree, partly because I don't share your view that democratic control and structure is "poor". Mainly because trying to flip the tables and redefine the goal and aspirations of the EU is a bit far fetched, as it doesn't even include becoming a federal Europe.
> Even European policies like RGPD are always enforced locally at country level, there is no such thing as European government.
That is by design, not a mistake.
> I don't agree, partly because I don't share your view that democratic control and structure is "poor".
Current democratic control is mostly sufficient for what the EU is today : a union of independent countries. But this control is not enough at all if we wanted the EU to become a government with executive power.
> That is by design, not a mistake.
I never implied it was a mistake, neither that it was a bad thing.
2) I think you overestimate the involvement of the US federal government in law-enforcement across the country. A lot of (most?) laws are actually passed and enforced at state level, with the FBI only getting involved in the worst situations or where cross-state cooperation is necessary. California alone has tons of gdpr-like laws that it sets and enforces independently. There is an entire US political culture based around "state rights" that constantly pushes for having a looser federal structure that looks very much like what the EU is today.
3) it's not like they don't have universities in Minnesota or Nebraska, a lot of people sticks around where they were born. The difference is that the ones who don't, find it easy enough to relocate. This helps creating world-beating industrial districts like Hollywood, SF, Houston, New York, etc etc - because they can attract the best of the best among 400m people.
100 years ago people rarely moved from a village. 50 years ago they rarely moved from a city. Now they rarely move from a country. See where it's going?
Maybe, and I'm not even against the idea. But it would have nothing to do with European Union (the current entity)
> 2) [...]
I'm not an US expert, and I mostly have the same picture as you. I don't see what you are trying to prove ?
> 3) [...]
I never said that one system was better than the other, just that they are different with different strengths and different weakness but that migrating from one to the other is extremely difficult and probably require creating new entities. I totally can imagine an European Federation but I don't see it being the same entity as the European Union.
We are going into hypotheticals here. I am pretty convinced you are wrong, but only time will tell.
> I don't see what you are trying to prove ?
It was mentioned that the EU "cannot even enforce <some law>", but the reality is that the US federal government, that model of global cohesive superpower, more often than not cannot do that either. Do we go around saying the US government cannot do anything right, because coordinating 50 states is impossible? No, of course they can do some stuff right. Same for the EU. Already the fact that there is one "supreme tribunal" across the continent is quite remarkable, as well as a single currency for most of the Union, or a single arrest warrant, etc etc. Things move slowly but they do move, and if enough people keep pushing for a united Europe, sooner or later we'll get there.
On the other hand, people are forced to uproot and discard their entire social support network - family, friends and others - multiple times in their lives. This does not only negatively impact happiness, but also has severe side effects and associated costs!
This can range from not having a place to crash (or a source to borrow money from) when getting priced out of a home or losing your job, but also having to waste money on childcare, family meetings / events being more expensive because people are spread all over the country and similar problems. And for the elderly, they are dumped in care homes with substandard but expensive care instead of being around their families in their final days. Call me old-fashioned but I find this disgusting.
And I didn't even touch the topic if this uprooting of people is detrimental to their mental health, especially for children - I would not be surprised if the rise of depression and other MH disorders can be linked to being constantly on the move in childhood!
The worst net negative for society as a whole is that enforcing mobility creates a massive concentration of people in urban areas (where rents explode and traffic becomes untenable) on one side and "left behind" rural areas on the other side where population erosion only leads to bitterness and erosion of trust in democracy itself, and any investment in infrastructure or life quality becomes prohibitively expensive.
We have seen the culmination of decades of neoliberalism in the rise of nationalist demagogues across democracies worldwide. We as humanity need to take a step back, cool down and ask ourselves if what we are doing is actually positive for society.
Obviously nobody should be forced to move. Nobody is "enforcing mobility" in Europe; they did in the past though, when Mussolini literally sold Italian labourers to half the planet and the UK shipped convicts to the colonies. The good ol' times often weren't that good. What we need is to provide all the freedom we can, and let people look for happiness wherever they see fit.
I'm simply going to assume on a stretch you're either on the LGBT+ spectrum or socially progressive, please forgive me if I'm wrong.
I disagree with you on the "not left behind" part: the "rural flight" aka all young people fleeing to urban areas as soon as they possibly can has made rural areas "left behind" socially, because the ones who stay behind objectively see that the young people are fleeing, but instead of placing the blame on politicians who did jack shit to keep rural areas liveable (e.g. by providing high speed internet and public transport), many of them resort to blaming "the gays" for "corrupting their children" and similar - which in turn is even more incentive for those few youth that remain to flee. It's a vicious circle.
Something like 40% of my high-school classmates have moved to another city or country, for one reason or another, and the ones who've remained seem to have become somewhat hyper-localistic, almost as a reflex or justification for not doing the same.
I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think forcing me or others to stick around would have made much of a difference beyond generating even more social resentment.
Or it's always the same people who move a lot.
I agree, at first glance it seems like the global approach is an overkill.
I think it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem though.
Is the global eID/eWallet an overkill, because we're already at the peak of the within-EU movement of people?
Or, is the burden of switching countries too big and this prevents people from freely moving within the Union when looking for opportunities?
IMO it's the latter.
As anecdata if I had to get VISA and only temporary right to remain I would probably have not moved to Netherlands, and it has genuinely stopped me considering moving to America.
As a British / Irish citizen I'm acutely aware that there are now new barriers to non-eu British citizens, and that'll impact how many people move around Europe from UK. Especially people who cannot afford to navigate the additional costs and bureaucracy, or who are scared of risking family security with temporary stays etc.
In the Netherlands you can change your address in every municipality, using our DigiD system. Nowadays you can also use the European system to log in.
And don't forget, while 3% may sound insignificant, it is still over 13 million people.
I see. Here in Finland electronic services has been widely implemented and very successfully so. I haven't been required to show up in person for anything in quite some time (altough I sometimes have). Government bodies are also very keen to inform about and push for the e-services available. Especially in these pandemic times, which I believe further incented the long tail - if there was one - to catch up and offer self-service online.
I belive Sweden is as far if not further than Finland, but I wouldn't know(!) because the ID and eID was a hassle I didn't cope with the last time I lived there ;) Thing were fine anyway, "because EU, Nordics".
I don't see why this should be done online. The registration/change of address requires a proof. Many services like bank accounts, pensions, tv tax etc. are linked to one's registration address. A one time physical presence (or a similar variant) is a reasonable tradeoff between verification and convenience. You create a meaningful hurdle and make people liable for their statements. Convenience is not the only metric to decide what should be done online.
1. You notify your new local council of the change of address.
2. A police officer visits your new home to check whether you actually live there.
3. Your official address is updated in the government's records and on the ID card.
Step 2 takes place in your home; step 3 requires you to physically go to the town hall because the information on the eID card needs to be updated. But step 1 should be doable online but isn't in every municipality. However, I think this is more a problem of every municipality doing this on their own rather than using a shared system. Also, the frustrating part is not that you need to go to the town hall, but that it has very limited and inconvenient opening hours and (in larger places) often long waiting times.
Burgerprofiel has recently gone live ( because of Covid) after a long beta.
It was used for your "vaccinatie aanvraag".
Wallonia and Brussels are long from ready.
According to [2] the Austria eID is already valid EU-wide.
[1] https://www.buergerkarte.at/en/
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_electronic_signatu...
yes, but it's so common to expatriate nowadays, also for short periods. so it would be nice to have a digital ID thing to deal with different administrative stuff, in different countries...
However, ~1M goes back every year, so the affected people are more than the ones _currently_ living abroad.
Moreover, there are services that also intra-EU tourists can benefit from: - buying products >18 y.o. at automatic machines - simplifying buying drugs at pharmacies (we have EHIC, but it doesn't cover not-urgent care) - having fast track at airports without having an EU passport (in many countries people have an ID but not a passport) - easier lookup for police during random checks
[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=738&langId=en&pub...
I would prefer if it worked the way "my id" works in Poland. When someone wants to confirm my identity, I am getting redirected to a "my id" provider (typically a bank I have account in), I log in, I see what data are required (for instance my age) by the data requestor and I am done.
Everything is recorder who was checking which data, when and why. If there is some leak, it is easy to find who should be blamed.
I am not a big fan of EU in its present shape, but if EU would make all countries to agree for some sane standard of identification in a secure, privacy preserving way, it would be definitely beneficial.
This was quite a frustrating experience. Some time after leaving the country I got e-mails saying that SKAT, the local tax authority, had documents/messages for me to read on the secure message platform eBoks.
However, try as I might, I was unable to convince anyone to restore access since I was no longer a resident. I agonized quite a bit over this since I dreaded inadvertently being a fraud.
It would have saved me a lot of grief if the Danish e-gov services would have federated with Belgian and other EU identity services.
Edit: Forgot to say this is something The Netherlands already does pretty well. Dutch e-gov services, or at least those from Belastingdienst federate with many European idenity service providers including Belgium. Great for cross border workers.
As far as I know, the Dutch government has been pretty slow in their EIDAS implementation, even (nearly?) missing some deadlines, maybe the Belgian government has a similar problem?
For some integrations with Wallonia, we are currently forced to use the federal integration, since their implementation hasn't even started yet :(
You are correct about eidas, it seems to be handled by the federal government currently, but there's not much documentation on it ( Belgium) and i have seen some applications integrating that way. So i suppose the issue is documentation and discoverability.
And the partial conflict of interest with itsme
Like is the case with my own government, I don't have very great expectations of Belgium's federal government and their IT projects. I'd wish countries could just share their implementations with other governments. Hell, I believe any code developed with public money should be open source for the benefit of everyone, but governments aren't a fan of that because companies charge more for developing software in the open.
(1) people think cooperation is a good idea
(2) and they also want to keep their own countries and identities
Once we start moving towards a single country, the inevitable question becomes, which rules and values should people follow? Which country gets to assert its way of life on the others? Or perhaps the virtual state known as the "EU" should assert its own values (whatever they may be)?
Now imagine expanding the EU to Turkey. Can we change their legislation to be more liberal? Or should the EU countries follow the hard line authoritarian islam that Erdogan pushes? No one is willing to change. And no one has to as long as the EU stays as a form of cooperation between nations.
If the EU pushes towards a single country, power struggles over values will follow.
As a Swede, I strongly disagree with this idea. My country is essentially a "democratic oligarchy" with a wealth inequality similar only to Russia.[1]
The current eID system in Sweden is a private oligopoly run by, amongst others, the Wallenberg family and a previous prime minister. This oligopoly is used to stifle competition.[2]
Since the politicians are so deeply involved in the banking sector,[3] the only real hope of change is that a higher power takes more control.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/747a76dd-f018-4d0d-a9f3-4069bf2f5... [2] https://www.realtid.se/konkurrens-storbankerna-har-nekat-fin... [3] https://www.expressen.se/dinapengar/toppsossarna-som-tjanar-...
A more durable solution would be to move. If sovereignty is ceded to that higher power, and that higher power subsequently becomes corrupt, your range of options significantly narrow.
Somalia maybe? But i doubt it.
This is typical of a certain political mindset: too big of a state ain't working, but surely an even bigger state shall work. This time, believe us!
The answer is not "more of what doesn't work". The answer is less.
Odin?
Itsme is really expensive to use ( private for profit company that is being pushed)
Okish is the right word ;), but progress is on the way.
Is there reason why this isn't used because noone needs it or because it's too inconvenient to use because we don't have such a system?
EU also didn't do a lot of commerce cross-borders until Schengen, Euro and other agreements made such commerce significantly easier and more viable.
You can sign up directly through the service if you are a permanent resident of either of those countries. Although I was an EU citizen, I was not a citizen of these countries, so to be able to sign up I had to open a bank account - which I don't use, as I already have one in my home country. Opening a bank account was also harder than it should be, if you are a permanent resident you can do it online, but as I was a temporary resident - even though I had a Lithuanian issued ID card and personal code - I had to go to a bank to do it in person.
So is such a system really needed? Not really, but there are many arbitrary barriers in place that make freedom of movement harder than it should be. Systems like this should make it fair, and stop countries from discriminating (purposely or not) against citizens of other EU countries.
I currently need to maintain digital IDs for Italy, Spain, the UK and Sweden, plus different implementations of those depending on banks/services. Add the complexity of phone numbers that are no longer valid and / or services that do not allow foreign numbers / addresses (more than you think, especially with companies).
I would LOVE to have one single ID system to rule them all (supposing it's VERY secure).
There will always be irreconcilable language differences and people do have a preference for staying in their birthplace, but that is no reason to not improve things.
I'm more worried about the EU actually implementing this well, but time will tell.
Being a Swede who now lives in Germany, I can tell you that the lack of system level integration or even compatibility is a real hassle.
The procedure to obtain a eID is solid enough that the states should really leverage all the work done by another state to verify who you are etc, and allow you to interact with institution in a safe way.
IMHO it is one of the best things which could really define us as Europeans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NO2ID
All parties except one (Labour - who probably would oppose it now), most trades unions, the Scottish parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the London Assembly, major charities, famous authors, the list goes on and on. So it will be driving licences and previous addresses forever I'm afraid!
The SPID system[0] is based around multiple identity providers, which are all allowed to interoperate against the public login systems.
You can have an account with identity provider X and use it to login to the regional health system, and at the same time have a separate account with provider Y and use it to authenticate with the pension system. Currently there are 21M users which is > 30% of the population. It's pretty nice.
Looking into the details, I recently learned that the generalization of the national id dated from the Vichy regime, which... okay, yeah, I get why we might be alone in this.
But in practice, it works pretty well, and with very few negative effects.
The reason I say this is that getting an entire country to agree to support a government plan like a national ID tracker is much easier when the country is a monoculture with a population the size of a city.
Big LOL. A year for a project like this is hopelessly optimistic. I'd expect it will take 2 to 5 years for the basic centralized infrastructure to be made available, and 5 to 10 years for for countries to actually integrate it in their existing systems.
It's a great initiative which I'd strongly support, I hope it doesn't get discredited by pursuing unrealistic deadlines.
In other words, there was already a try in the past to implement an authentication federation between all UE countries. Tried to use that in a Spanish government site but it was broken at the time but it already supported authentication from other UE countries.
It might also be cheaper to use cash, given banking isn't typically free in Germany.
It eliminates a multitude of steps (sign up, proof of identity, credential management) to accessing any government service from booking COVID tests to paying taxes.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if the prolonged use of the DigID app (i.e. because it keeps crashing, or is offline for maintenance again) would have caused maniacal insanity.
Edit: The app works most of the time, but it is very unstable and not at all user friendly. No QR-code scanning feature but manual code input only, no login confirmation, no active session management or insight, most services allow you to log in with just your username/password and don't require the app at all, etc.
I do wonder why that code has to be manual and not embedded into the QR code, I assume there's some reason for it. But it's also only four letters, not terribly tedious.
I could imagine online service providers like a hosting provider etc. might start to integrate.
After all this would have 2FA and be administered by an authority that can actually verify who I am when access needs to be recovered.
Long term, maybe the EU could do a cheap micro payment system, one can dream :)
It's an SSO service with a strong proof of identity tied to your official id and a vault to store your official documents. France already has something very similar but which can only be used with the state. It works really well.
What about those of us who prefer proof of identity to be only as strong as necessary and therefore as loose as possible?
I don't want my mobile devices to have a strong proof of identity associated with them. Ever.
It's for convenience when you do.
Sure, sure, downvote. But it's no longer possible to buy beer from vending machines without inserting your ID card as proof of age.
But that one small downside. It's not like you can't get beer anywhere.
I know I can order beer from our grocery stores online, and as far as I know they don't perform any age checks since I pay with cash on delivery most of the time. But I am in my 40s and look that way so I maybe they just don't bother asking.
Needless to say, people were not enthused.
Does it seems like solution in search of a problem?
I'm sure there's a % of people who deal with multiple EU governments at a time or frequently move. But to me that seems like a tiny fraction. Would be good if they published some stats around this i.e., y% or x million would use this on a daily/monthly basis or some such. Would be a shame if such a mega undertaking would end up useful to a niche customer base.
In 2019 1.4 million people migrated from one EU state to another [1], and 3.3% of EU working age citizens lived outside their country of citizenship (and that's rapidly rising - a 40% increase over the last 10 years) [2].
That's a baseline minimum of people who clearly need this. It doesn't count people who don't register because they only move temporarily (where it's not worth registering today because without such a system the paperwork can be a hassle!), it doesn't count migrants who now have citizenship in their destination country, it doesn't count the many non-working-age people who retire to southern europe, and it doesn't count people who interact with foreign EU governments for any reasons other than permanent residency. For example, you might want to securely access EU personal data while on holiday for health care (a digital EHIC), you might need to share your foreign driving license details with a car rental company, or your work may involve cross-EU business administration.
This wallet won't be useful for everybody, but if it works well it would be a very valuable tool for many millions of people today, and likely many more in future.
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... (full article, first paragraph) [2]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
I wonder if they should decouple solution to payments (to utility etc.,) from the identity.
As for the payments, I believe it's better to expand an existing solution than build one from ground up. iDEAL for example, is a proven solution that's been in use in Netherlands for a while now. And since it's based on IBAN that's understood by all (?) the EU banks I guess it's worth expanding iDEAL to pan EU.
Even the simple case of age verification when buying alcohol or cigarettes or computer games on a web shop in a different country, or the more involved checks of identity when looking at within-EU online prescription drug buying, car or home insurance purchase, vaccination status verification etc.
India have UPI and while that also on the surface sounds great it's filled with all sorts of wacky rules for implementation (on thing is that you have to show it prominently on the first page).
The primary issues is that it will basically be competing with a lot of private companies and thus once again hinder the ability for many startups to get off the ground because they are in competition with the government.
The never ending problem of the EU, they try to solve problems politically that the market is perfect for.
The EU is absolutely incompetent when it comes to cybersecurity. Nearly every single one of their member governments have been pwned, including Germany, France and Belgium among others.
These people can't even keep their own communications secure (Merkel's emails were hacked less than a year ago), why would they give a damn about your personal data?
This is to just allow you to sign in to other parties with your government ID if needed. (instead of other parties asking you for passport/ID for compliance/KYC)
Central repository won't store anything, the same as google SSO doesn't store your data if you sign in to third party sites. (it just authenticates you).
Maybe this is what you are misunderstanding?
Also, government already has your data, so that 1 central repository for IDs already exists.
As for hacking... going after any one of those 3000 is less likely to get you in trouble then going after a government (as incompetent as they are). See oil pipeline hack to understand consequences.
> "The digital wallet will securely store payment details and passwords and allow citizens from all 27 countries to log onto local government websites or pay utility bills using a single recognised identity, the newspaper said, citing people with direct knowledge of the plans."
Doesn't that directly imply that it is more than a simple SSO?
If you go the FT article, you have a link to the official documentation. Draw your own conclusion, I still see it as SSO.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/trust-serv...
So, given all that, the only thing you can safely assume that most of what EU governments store on you is known by a wide range of foreign intelligence agencies; some of them considerably more hostile than the NSA which we all love to hate. Mostly you're not providing any new information whatsoever when you fill in the forms to enter e.g. the US. It's just security theater.
Once you have an EU wide digital identiy+authentication (with multifactor and biometrics and all that) You can then move onto implementing fine grained authorization for people to manage what data various government agencies get and can share
They will probably create a system very similar to what Okta does which is great as it would save 27 countries reinventing the wheel, and one thing about security that is important is not to reinvent the wheel.
I find it amazing that anybody would think this is a good thing. Then again, I shouldn't be amazed. There are numerous examples of people eagerly trading privacy for [perceived] convenience.
I am a Brexit supporter; but I don't trust the UK civil service to build an ID system that is both secure and privacy-preserving. Based on past performance, they'd build a system that runs 10x over budget, and isn't secure.
I'd want to see the details, but I'd be much more inclined to trust an EU ID system than a UK one.
The NHS is busy trying to sell all of our health data to companies like Google. Again. The NHS dataset is the most valuable and complete in the world - it's worth a lot of money, and it's unique. Unfortunately, NHS Digital haven't a clue how valuable - they sold a million records to the Society of Actuaries, for less than 4 grand.
So I don't trust any app from the NHS to be nice with my data. I think the app will be withdrawn soon, because most people don't use it.
Anyway, I simply don't carry a smartphone. I don't walk down the street, diddling away on my fondle-slab. I carry two vaccination cards in my wallet. There's nowhere I need to go that needs the NHS app.