Hacker News Reader

Comment by akdev1l | Hacker News Reader

> ALL sovereign countries should practice sovereign software and safeguard PII of its citizens

Most countries are incapable of this and when they do try they do a worse job.

My government has a website that allows you to fetch a person’s voting centre by knowing their ID number. Our ID numbers are sequential. Therefore you can use that website to get approximate location for literally everyone.

My government also has a website to request passports online. I was playing with it and it turns out they have an open GraphQL endpoint that lets me query billing transactions for _everyone_.

But sure the software was made in my country.

View on HN

> Therefore you can use that website to get approximate location for literally everyone.

In America, before the Internet took off, every year everyone would get a book called the "white pages" that had the name, address, and phone number, of everyone who lived in their city.

The American view of privacy is that "openness makes for a civil society".

Although one can argue that hasn't been working out well for us lately ..

Likewise, marriages are publicly recorded and accessible online, as are all property purchases, births, deaths, and even property tax payments.

Though for some reason we consider income taxes to be super secret. Everything else is public, but not those! (How much cash someone put down to buy a house? Public. How much money that person makes? Not public. How much money everyone donates to politicians? Public.)

> Therefore you can use that website to get approximate location for literally everyone.

Approximate address, surely. Addresses are ... usually not very secret in the first place, though? It'd be absolutely fascinating if your government not only tracked everyone's location but assigned their voting center by current location, but, well,

> It'd be absolutely fascinating if your government not only tracked everyone's location but assigned their voting center by current location, but, well,

That's exactly what happens in Turkiye. I assume GP is there.

I guess you misunderstood the word “location”.

The voting centre is typically the closest public school to where you live.

So when I say location here I mean the neighborhood where you live.

Also the main concern isn’t the government. They clearly already have the data and will always have that data. They also have the actual address of people.

The main concern is literally anyone can access the data and this thread is about countries protecting PII lol.

In some Western countries voter's lists with names and addresses are publicly accessible, if I understand correctly. Helps to make sure government doesn't add dead souls to vote for them.

IMHO That's where the software model could change if more countries gave a serious shake at managing national services.

As you point out it's hard and few can do it, so getting more common open source platforms would be a natural evolution. Then relying on global providers that act as a service developer instead of a service owner would still be a huge difference.

That sounds great. I imagine it would turn out the same way using local transit has. Some are awesome like the netherlands and some are hostile towards users that you can’t even properly use it if you arrive too late at night because no one is available like france.

Everyone in this thread seems to thinks government is able to get things done. That is not what my last 40 years of life has shown me.

Most countries ARE capable of that. Or rather, most people of a country don't like platforms not dominated by their own primary language, and this is passively achieved by that tendency.

Lots of Russian stuffs on the Internet come through Telegram, meanwhile China has Weibo and TikTok, Korea does its thing in KakaoTalk and Facebook/Insta, Japan uses LINE along Twitter/Insta instead, so on and so forth. Everyone could be on Facebook, but that isn't what is going on.

The Interweb isn't so global, and English isn't the lingua franca of all communications. It's just the perception one experiences through an American door, though the Web do tend to be more developed in en-US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com