What power does the EU/its governments gain here?
Aren't they already the only identity provider (passports, ID cards, drivers license)?
>Our European companies, large and small, will also benefit from this digital identity. They will be able to offer a wide range of new services since the proposal offers a solution for secure and trusted identification services.
It mentions things like going to nightclubs, and I assume it will include many more things that would otherwise not require a mobile app. Because this all now goes through government controlled servers, it follows they will have knowledge of all these new services, and all this new activity on every single citizen. In practice, this means government will know much more because this is now a widespread, mandatory form of ID.
The question for me is, why does government need all of this information, as oppose to how can government intervene and make ID verification more convenient. The scale of this is unprecedented as well, from the amount of people doing it to the granularity of where and how it's going to be used.
Option 1 - You give him your ID card and you expose a wealth of data, including your full name, address and SSN/OIB to that person
Option 2 - He scans your phone app, gets a big green mark which proves your exact age, or even just that you are 18+ and nothing more
Option 2 is more convenient, but at what cost? I would think the probabilities of the cost being high is proportional to the probability that government will have corruption and abuse the system, which seems high in history and even today in many countries.
Option 2: the same guy has no idea who you are. Instead: your ID gets scanned, the scan hits a government server for verification. A record is now kept forever of where you went, when and with whom and this information is added to create a profile of you (and your friends/partners). They can know if you were cheating on your partner, whether you where dating, if you went out "with the boys" that night, what political flavor the people you party with prefer, and so on and so forth. 100's of people and algorithms can access these records in the future in secret, including: the NSA (even if you're European, all secret service data is shared with the NSA), local secret services, the police if they want access, the tax-man, any future dictator(s) that rises up and his subordinates, same for others in other countries that are friendly to him, anybody in politics interested in you for whatever reason that may develop in the future when data access rules get weaker (or remain unpoliced), and so on and so forth. Furthermore, if for whatever reason your political preference becomes unwanted in the future, you can fully automatically be banned from public life at the press of a button with 100% efficiency (this already happens in countries such as China as we speak, Canada CAN'T WAIT to have such a system as well).
I pick option 1.
It blows my mind that people don't see where this is going after Snowden.
The majority may actually approves it, instead of turning a blind eye. During the covid crisis, how much of the population was ok with the government (taking France as example here) excluding from social life, and in some case professional life, 10% of people, on the ground of them not pumping Pfizer et al. stock price? I bet on something like 70%. Those people think because there are in the "winner" side they'll always stay there, and don't realize how fast the wind turns, and the same method will apply to them soon for whatever reason.
Similar with Johhny Depp and Amber Herd trial being heavily publicized, while they were silent on the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. Whoever said that the mainstream media are the enemy of the people are correct.
I mean, you're already assuming things work a certain way that is not necessarily true. The ID card could just have all the information stored and signed by the govt. Then a scanner would only have to check that the signature is valid, no need to actually ping the govt server.
I haven't checked the technical details, so I've got no clue. But this is how the EU COVID-19 vaccine verification works IIRC. No pinging of a central server is ever done - the mobile app just checks that the message in the QR code is properly signed with the expected root of trust.
Until the next time there is a terrorist attack or other scary event, and the opportunistic politicians say "We could have stopped this if only we had been keeping these pings in a database, just like we keep logs of everyone's internet metadata[0]. Don't worry, the database would only be looked at by AI, so it's not even a breach of your privacy."
Then everyone is just a single firmware update away from a completely different regime, and it's too late to boycott the app because everyone assumes you have it and requires you to run the latest version. Of course, you could always try protesting, but you might not get very far.[1]
[0] https://aboutintel.eu/european-metadata-retention/
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bank-protest-stopp...
And also that government employees are incompenent so they'll send the entire thing through wetransfer or something and it'll be leaked sooner or later.
Really, all the info goes to the establishment and/or the company providing the reader.
The old fashioned “bouncer will forget all the info” doesn’t apply any more.
https://www.flhsmv.gov/pdf/newdl/fl_2dbarcodecalibration.pdf
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...
privacy forums were recommending people run magnets over the stripes on id’s at least 10 years ago when companies started swiping them.
is the new digital id terrifying? probably. but honestly from a privacy perspective, the way companies and government working together suck up all of our digital movements is terrifying if privacy matters at all to us.
to me, this was an obvious next step considering the world we’ve decided to build. we’re doing this. government employees. corporation employees.
we’re allowing power to consolidate at a rapid pace. we can’t decimate the separation of governments and companies, then build company after company after company which heavily rely on human data for their profits, and then simultaneously be shocked when this happens.
either we have privacy from both governments and companies or we don’t. particularly in a world where we refuse to hold power to any sort of reasonable standards (and by “power” i mean governments, corporations, wealthy individuals, individuals with power backing them, organizations, etc…)
i guess my ramble really boils down to this: many of us on this exact forum are building the tools. many of us on this forum are directly enabling power of all kinds to consolidate. it isn’t clear to me how we can complain about it too.
Plus you will have an EU digital ID just like your credit card soon. I already have a biometric passport. Checking it is way faster than checking an ID. In Bergamo they had separate priority queues for biometric passports.
Know exactly who is using your venue, using ID card scanner technology to find out if an ID is genuine in a matter of seconds. Scanner has operated in every major city in the UK since 2003
https://www.brixtonbuzz.com/2013/04/concerns-grow-over-the-r...
Follow anyone for long enough and they will look guilty of something. And with the 1000s of laws, does anyone think they won't break one?
Win-win.
Bouncer can ask for more information and you can't even lie about it. Asking for phone number and address is somewhat reasonable in our current dystopic present on the basis of KYC and "what if there's an emergency". And you can be sure that the data will be stored in local DB with poor oversight and security and it will be used for marketing and eventually leaked.
If only the government will have access to this data it will definitely be an improvement compared to the current situation where everybody ( Google, FB, MS, Apple, dark web, Cloudfare, government) has acces to your data, only you don't.
Now we are talking about a single non-elected EU government controlling every transaction, not just the issuance of fiat money.
I personally think that with time this will implode, because the society always evolves towards more freedom, towards less centralization. There are multiple steps now in the reverse direction. However the discrepancy between the views of the government, the ruling classes and the reality is becoming so big that without a grand catastrophe (a global war, a revolution, etc) the inevitable correction seems less and less possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_to_the_European_Parl...
I would say the total opposite. The natural equilibrium is no freedom and complete centralization but we have just been in a far from equilibrium state recently.
I imagine over the next 100 years "freedom" will be completely redefined. It was only 40 years ago in the US that you could go to a bar, get incredibly drunk and then drive home without a seat belt. This was normal behavior that is now 100% illegal. It is hard for me to imagine a future that doesn't look like modern day China but with monitoring of blood and brain states as well. Society has already spoken that we will trade freedom for safety. With pooling resources for health insurance we are going to have to know collectively about early warning signs in your blood once possible in order to keep us all safe.
We are going to have to monitor your brain state once possible for early warning signs of people becoming unhinged to keep us all safe.
I mean you don't have the freedom to travel west and claim 160 acres of land anymore. It wasn't that long ago people had that freedom but it is laughable by today's standards. I think this is how people in the future will feel about total surveillance because that is kind of how it is now anyway.