New Digital ID System to Be Pushed on Austrians This December
reclaimthenet.org
reclaimthenet.org
The new app basically just unifies various online forms that were already present, such as changing your address registration. None of this stuff is new and you already needed to sign in with Handysignatur to use these forms online anyway. More importantly, nobody in Austria forces you to use these services, you can file literally all of these on paper. They even have a service to fill out the forms digitally and then print them. The app also doesn't request stuff like location information and doesn't do anything nafarious as far as I can tell. It is also worth noting that ID Austria supports FIDO instead of a phone too.
Sounds good to me.
"Despite the convenience bandwagon that ID Austria seems to promise, the critical concern of safeguarding citizens’ privacy rights cannot be overlooked."
For once, could you articulate these privacy concerns instead of spouting conspiracy theories?
Government needs good way to reliably identify its citizens if it wants to provide online services for them. It has to be strong identification anyway because most online services that government provides are sensitive.
Unless this is used for some more malicious purpose than login in to do taxes, I don't see any issue with this. They seem to be allowing it to be used by commercial entities, which might be more concerning, but not necessarily. Depends on what is shared and how authentication is handled. Many commercial entities anyway need your actual identity (like banks) it is much better that instead every single company collecting all information they only need basic information and can use the government service to handle identity verification.
I think this might be what the common people are afraid of. While I don't use social media, I'd suppose many people wouldn't feel comfortable to explicitly disclose their identities to the all-devouring global companies. Another thing might be a requirement for identity verification in app stores, which is another story related to other regulatory proposals.
I wish. Digital signatures (Handysignatur) have been available to the masses in Austria for 10+ years, but I have yet to see one of the big banks being able to accept a digitally signed document. It's still the "visit your bank in person" process.