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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely this appears to introduce unnecessary friction. After all, if you can trust the government, you don't need this feature. If you cannot trust the government, then it is safe to assume that they aren't just sitting on their hands pouting that there's no national ID they can use to tie together an identity with.

I think it's dangerously naive to assume a nation with as capable a surveillance state as the US to be physically unable to tie together everything about you just because there's no national ID.

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The government isn't a large, monolithic entity (despite all rumors to the contrary), and the biggest issue would probably be single employes or departments that use this system for things they aren't supposed to. Trusting the goverment at large or every single employee are different things.

Sure, no different than Google employees now, right? You add detectors and consequences. We're not breaking any new ground here are we?

I would argue that google employees are a much smaller issue:

- There are many less people (probably 2-3 orders of magnitude) accessing the data at all at Google, and (probably?) most sensitive data isn't accessible at all

- As you can't choose to avoid the government, the standard of trust should be much higher

- I don't know how well it works at Google. The reports of videogame leaks through employees accessing accessing unreleased Videos and the (for now) inability from Google to solve this problem at least indicates to me that the approach has issues.

- There are many more valid reasons for a government employee to access the data, so it's harder do differentiate. You also have the issues of police dempartments (and similar), where an access might not be allowed but done as unoffical policy "for the greater good"

- I would think that Google is much more capable of implementing and managing such a system than goverment suppliers or agencies, unfortunately

> Genuinely this appears to introduce unnecessary friction. After all, if you can trust the government

but if you can't trust the government, the friction is necessary.

> unable to tie together everything about you just because there's no national ID.

SSN anyone?

If you can’t trust the government, the friction is irrelevant. They just generate a different primary key and don’t give it to you. Evil adversaries don’t play by rules. You’re just harming yourself in the good times and not helping yourself in the bad times. It's not like a government who wants to do real harm to individuals is just going to go whelp, no national ID, I guess we'll just go home and not hurt anyone.

If I were a hypothetical evil US government and there wasn't an SSN, I'd just create a database with an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, compel Visa, MasterCard and American Express to send me 6 months of transaction history under a national security letter, correlate and quantize them all and presto, a few hours later, indexing complete.

It doesn't even have to be 95% accurate, although with some otherwise-anonymous looking demographics data you can get several nines of uniqueness. [1]

[1] https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.p...

well put

This makes sense if you think `government_trustworthiness` is a `Boolean.`

If you think it's a `Float in range [0..100]` it makes a lot less sense.

How so? I'm curious if you could expound on that. I'm open to a more nuanced explanation.

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