Why are unalienable IDs an awful idea? Unalienable IDs seem to me to be the "default" of human societies. Before technology, everyone had "unalienable IDs" -- if you saw Bob, it was Bob.
But in this case the comparison doesn't really work. If Bob went to a new town he could introduce himself as Dave and no-one would be any the wiser.
By comparison eyeball scans are owned by a private company, infinitely replicable and reusable. They could follow you absolutely everywhere you go without your permission.
Sorry sir, your eye has been revoked, you can no longer authenticate to this, or any of our partner services.
I know that HN is crawling with individual-responsibility people. To those people I say: do you shrug coldly when your aged mothers get scammed? Are villages without electricity fair game?
Your eyeballs are scanned now everyone will think you are Bob, even if you actually are Dave, because that’s what the app says. Doesn’t matter what you say or argue because the app says you are Bob and the app is never wrong.
I was at Walmart buying some heavily discounted gel blasters. I ordered them for pickup originally but then thought “Walmart employee will misplace it “accidentally” and then buy it when the shift is over” (it happens, a lot). As such, I decide to go myself and pick them up. Turns out Walmart online vs in store clearance price is a big difference so I ask for a price adjustment at the register. I wait for the super user trainer expert person who then calls more super expert backup. They proceed to explain to me that they could do a price adjustment but the app says there are none in stock. Mind you I have the blasters right there at the register and explain to them that these products actually are in stock and say “can we all agree that we are all seeing the same thing right here?”
Answer: sorry, no because again the app says it’s not in stock and we no longer have that product.
The app says no and what the app says is final. Dammit. You are Bob and these gel blasters in front of us don’t exist. Goodluck Bob.
Scale brings trust problems. Got a million people in your city? Even without technology, you probably don't know Bob. Bob can rip you off without realistically expecting repercussions, unlike in a small village where everyone depends on each other, and Bob would get kicked out and have to try to find somewhere else. So scale also breaks a lot of the value of permenant IDs, and things like outsourced trust (credit reports, etc) will never be perfect. And in a big society, even a 99% success rate would be A LOT of people getting fucked over.
Can this eyeball-thing fix that? Largely, no - any errors in the system that aren't identity theft will still be there. And potentially worse: even fancy technological systems are almost always vulnerable to technological exploits. And then if too much trust is placed in the validation mechanism, a bad actor could potentially go nuts.
Sure, it could be abused. But literally everything has the potential to be abused. Life is about weighing the risks of abuse against the reward of opportunity. And honestly I think we've gotten really bad at assessing that risk in the past half century, with powerful individuals muddying our perception even further to pursue their own goals.
> Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-seeing...
Interesting. That makes me wonder if cultures around the world feared twins precisely due to the fact that ''unalienable ids' were the default of human societies'. In 'Things Fall Apart', identical twins are automatically 'dispatched' in the evil forest as soon as they are born because they are deemed 'evil'. I never understood why. But since identical twins break the natural default id system of human societies, maybe some societies felt it better to sacrifice the few to preserve the system.