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Comment by jruohonen | Hacker News Reader

"The transition, spearheaded by the Federal Ministries of Finance and Interior, is aimed at providing users with highly secure access to an array of government and commercial services, along with the ability to sign digital documents in an easy and swift manner. The ID Austria is also promised to be usable throughout the European Union soon, hinting toward a far-reaching blueprint that could be replicated elsewhere."

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?

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Yes. This article doesn't provide any actual conserns.

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.

> Many commercial entities anyway need your actual identity (like banks)

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.

> They seem to be allowing it to be used by commercial entities, which might be more concerning, but not necessarily.

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.

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