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I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that governments do identity better than anyone else and adding more dependency on it just increases the value of the government ID making it an even more lucrative target to steal/forge.

Fake ids are a thing and the quality depends on how much you spend. Governments also have reasons to lie about identity themselves (think spies).

A true identity solution means being able to cross reference your identity across multiple entities (federal government, state and municipal, employers you’ve worked for, businesses you’ve interacted with, etc etc).

I'm sure there's a criminal underworld where you can just buy a passport to get you into a country, but for the average person, passports are really hard to fake, which makes them good enough as identity for logging into your average dog photo sharing site.

Why would I want to log in to a dog sharing website using my real identity? Maybe I'm an outlier but I really value the pseudonymity possible thanks to the internet. I can share as much or as little about me as I want, and the dumb things I probably wrote when I was 14 are not immortalized with my name next to them.

A dog what web site?

They said dogs, not cyberdogs, so you might be safe?

It'll be a cold day in Cupertino before I accept a UN ID.

I'll reconsider once the corporate death counts begin to match the governmental ones but until then I'll take my chances.

The temperature in Cupertino is currently 50F. That probably doesn't meet your definition of cold though.

A bit chilly.

That is unironically shorts weather.

60% of Americans approx don't have passports. In India about 93%. It's not an ideal solution to logging in to your website.

Also in the UK various government types have tried to bring in national ID and the people rebel. People eh?

> Everyone would have their citizenship passport ID and their UN ID, and the latter could serve as a "break glass" master key to support immigration

Immigration doesn’t work that way. You don’t lose or transition from one identity federation to another. You maintain both, typically for the rest of your life.

My personal wishlist is that decision makers and designers of identity systems must include people with real world experience of multiple nationalities, tax residencies, migration and so on.

Currently, these systems are already built on false premises and immigrants suffer a lot – not only because of malice but to a large extent because the bureaucrats didn’t think like security-minded engineers. The edge cases are extremely important when it comes to identity, because identity is required for a lot of basic needs. As the world is become more globalized, these issues are a lot more prevalent.

> and I think most of why it's hard is human rather than technical

Yes but I don’t see why that’s so surprising. It’s the identity of humans that’s the problem.

FWIW I think email is fantastic as identity, compared to the abysmal state of the alternatives. It doesn’t change when you cross a border like phone numbers. It’s not perfect when it comes to self-sovereignty and account recovery.

We'll know soon, something pretty close to what you're asking for is about to be rolled out in the EU: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

Fortunately that will be another nail in the coffin for the EU, at this point they’re just throwing the proverbial excrements at the wall and seeing what will stick. That’s how you get parties like the AfD at more than 30% of the vote (the NSDAP themselves were just a little over 30% too in early 1933).

> Passports are really the primary identity layer of Earth.

Umm, I'm not they're not that great as a primary identity either.

One edge case is that you can have have more than one valid passport for the one nationality. Another is of course that one can have more than one nationality.

I have a Google, Apple, Microsoft, and GitHub OIDC account among others. That's a feature not a bug.

Also, passports become useless once your government actively turns against you, see the current fate of adult Ukrainian men still residing in Ukraine.

The same thing risks happening with this government-approved online identity, I mean, how will the EU bureaucrats “handle” people like me that are openly against the West’s take in Ukraine? Will we get our accounts banned from posting pro-Russia content online?

> The same thing risks happening with this government-approved online identity [..]

Don't forget the Covid QR codes.

I think it's not a good idea. What if, due to unforeseen circumstances, you become homeless and passport-less?

Governments do a bad job here, not a good one.

They restrict people to a single immutable identity, that may not conform to other governments, that may not accommodate different languages and character sets, that are not flexible of gender, that do not reflect relationship types that aren't typically monogamous... the list goes on.

They offer a poor base implementation that is only sufficient due to the legal identity seldom actually being needed online. Which is a good thing, because identity theft would be so much worse if that was everywhere.

In the UK we don't have as fixed an idea of an identity as people think, Cherie Blair is also Cherie Booth Q.C. , Elton John is also Reginald Dwight, and for both people, both identities are real identities and sufficient to get bank accounts in the name of, it's only when it comes to a tax record and passport that you are reduced to a single identifier, but who is to say that the name on that is the preferred name of a person?

My bank account, bank card, accounts on most of my things, do not match my passport and birth certificate.

The alternative is corporate monopolist control, which is what is developing right now with OIDC where Google can "digital death penalty" you and lock you out of your life. The biggest realistic risk is this happening "accidentally" because some stupid bot at Google or Microsoft decides you are violating ToS, and since these companies have basically zero tech support it takes you weeks to unlock your account if at all.

I don't actually like governments owning the identity layer, but then again I am of the "necessary evil" school of thought regarding most of what governments do. It's marginally better than having corporate monopolies own it.

I'm a giant fan of decentralized identity, but there are two insanely hard problems with it:

(1) People lose keys, forget passwords, or get them stolen. They also lose or break security key hardware. I've heard stories of people paying people to actually excavate dumps to find lost Bitcoin keys for example.

(2) There's a chicken or egg problem of getting sites to support any decentralized login scheme without a monopolist like Google pushing it, and the latter have no reason to do so since they want to monopolize the identity layer.

Problem (1) is solvable to some extent by having companies that escrow keys for you. Escrowing with them would not be mandatory but they'd offer a "break glass" service for people who are willing to trade a bit of (potential) privacy for it. A good escrowing service would have a terms of service that forbids misuse of your identity.

Problem (2) is probably harder. Big tech will actively refuse to support any system that doesn't hand them a monopoly or at least an oligopoly.

BTW this is one area where cryptocurrency could have found an actual bona fide beneficial use case! But it's not as profitable as running scams and casinos so nobody did it.

This whole discussion seems to revolve around "Who will be the central authority, the permanent and unwaivering center of trust?". Really a good time to bring blockchain into the discussion, as this is actually something it's kind of designed to handle.

That's a tool, it still leaves open the question "Who will be the authority to determine what changes to allow to the blockchain?", the problem was not solved by introducing blockchain, you just changed the question slightly whilst adding a dependency that wasn't required originally.

Moreover proof of work can't work for non-currency use cases because it requires an incentive structure for the game theoretics to work.

> They restrict people to a single immutable identity

This is a good thing because this is what people have, one single immutable identity.

What you've identified are problems with assumptions about the relationship between various things and identity.

A key one is the relationship between name and identity. Two people can have the same name but aren't the same person. A person ca change their name but they haven't become a new person.

I can do anything I want to myself honestly. I can color my hair, have a sex change, lose weight, gain weight, have height augmentation surgery, get piercings grow a beard, change my name, whatever, but I'm still the same person. That is immutable. I still have the same mother and father, the same birthdate, lived in the same places, attended the same schools, studied the same things, etc.

My identity as far as the government is concerned is still tied to a single number. Yeah, they make it hard to change a lot of the other stuff related to that number (for good reason), but ultimately they are pretty good at knowing who I am based on that number.