[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
[2] https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/dodging-the-thought-poli...
I don’t know what that would look like but if I had congresses attention I’d like them to fix the problem rather than playing whack-a-mole with banning data sources. I don’t think any actual solutions come from that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40961834
TLDR Login.gov, and publishing a circular to allow businesses to use it to identity proof. Push all liability onto the business for losses if this method is not used to identity proof. ID card as ljm mentions, such as a passport card. Very similar to credit card EMV chips and the liability shift from magstripe.
> I don’t know what that would look like but if I had congresses attention I’d like them to fix the problem rather than playing whack-a-mole with banning data sources. I don’t think any actual solutions come from that.
Aggregating data means it can be lost. You must therefore make aggregating and storing data toxic, and impossible to be leaked through eventual mismanagement.
Those bits of information are worthless when you need to create a cryptographic signature with your ID card to do almost anything important.
If the card is lost or stolen they can just remove your old one from the keyserver. It's literally just public key crypto.
Identity theft is rampant in the countries that don't have such a system and basically require you give them increasing amounts of private information to prove who you are. In the UK that's every address you've lived in for 5 years, your council tax bill, your energy bill, your bank statement for a month... all because British people think an ID card means you'll get stopped on the street to show your papers.
That's probably because all of the anti-immigration and anti-foreigner people who are asking the government to stop people and ask them for their papers... this is not unique the the UK, Canada, or the United States either, and some of the countries plan to do more than just deport people.
Strong identity is increasingly a meaningful technical requirement, but glossing over the human impact of strong identity controls by the government is not going to have good outcomes either.
I think very few of those so-called right-wingers are -say- against doctors immigrating to one's country if there's a doctor shortage. As long as immigration is all done using legal means. And with proper checks and balances.
I'm a right winger (but not born and raised in the UK). And I am very much against illegal immigration. I also don't want to be required to wear an identity card / passport with me at all times.
Actually, with proper immigration policies in place, the state can be sure that most people inside the state are legal, law-abiding citizens. I don't think in such cases it does make sense to require people to wear an id card with them at all times.
But please give some more details on that. The only case I've heard about was a single attacker who was incorrectly called an immigrant.
The person was a immigrants child. Considering there obvious (violent) refusal to integrate they are too an immigrant.
Like, that context arguably makes it worse than if there was no inciting incident, because it's so blatantly blaming a huge group for one person.
it is a pattern.
Police were reluctant to investigate political grooming gangs, those in the House of Lords, nobility, etc.
Police were reluctant to investigate religuous grooming gangs, Christian Brothers ets.
I can't see how immigrant pedos are infinity worse rather than just more of the same.
The reluctance to investigate seems to be the issue, now it's compounded by scapegoating.
GPS coords then? Street names?
Any chance of a decent curry?
It was based on a false rumor that spread on social media that the perpetrator of a recent triple murder was a Muslim asylum seeker. It turns out that the perpetrator is a British citizen who was born in Britain and is Christian.
What this reminds me of are pogroms in Eastern Europe, which were often sparked by false rumors about Jews.
> Identity theft is rampant in the countries that don't have such a system
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPS_201
The first is religious nuts who think it would be a "mark of the beast"
The second is anti-government types who are, well, anti-government anything.
The third is many business owners, because it would become much harder/risky to hire illegal immigrants to work.
The anti-government types do hate the idea of a national ID, but they're already forced to carry a drivers license/state ID, and SS card so they've pretty much lost the battle already.
I'm afraid that it's the business owners who are our biggest hurdle.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hobby-lobby-mark-of-the-be...
> Human beings can't read a bar code.
- they can, and more importantly they almost never have to
> A lot of our product comes from cottage industries in Asia that couldn't mark their goods with bar codes if they tried.
- They can be added at the store/warehouse level, not every product needs one, and I've never seen a store that worked entirely on bar codes 100% of the time anyway.
> Inventory control by computer is not as accurate as you think.
- This assumes what I think, and it only needs to be more accurate than your current method. If it actually weren't more accurate, I don't think they'd have to fall back on "as you think" in their argument.
> Employees take more pride in their work when they know they are in charge, not some faceless machine.
- this doesn't even make sense.
> Customer service is better.
- questionable, but not impossible to support
> The time savings at check-out is minimal — and easily squandered.
- possible, but time savings at checkout is only one benefit.
- Reprogramming the computer for sales would take a huge effort in our case, because we put so many individual items on sale each week.
- It would take effort, but stores with much more inventory manage it just fine, even when new products are constantly coming in and sales are weekly.
> Twenty million dollars is a lot of money.
- I have no idea from the article what this is in reference to. Maybe the amount it would take for them to make the the switch? It's hard to say how much money it would save them so it's fair to say cost is a concern. I will say that over a long enough time period, it'd probably save more than it costs.
None of this means that concern over "the mark of the beast" is really the reason, but the reasons they gave don't make a lot of sense either. It could just as easily be that poor record keeping and manual entry at the register allow them commit fraud or something.
I suspect that if the mark of the beast plays any role at all, it's that no having barcodes panders to the christian customer base they've always heavily pandered to. Even just the rumor is basically viral marketing for them to that crowd.
Make the ID card optional, so that it simplifies things if you have it, but still allows operation without it. If 80% of law-abiding population has the card, only the stubborn deniers will remain targets of easy identity theft and fraud based on it. Partly it will stop being worth the effort, partly it will serve as a good control group.
Allow but do not require to use the card for employee identification. Whoever insists on hiring undocumented immigrants, could continue. Most industries don't do that, and would reap the benefits of a more secure identification.
Don't make the card universal. A bank card with a chip does not identify you for governmental agencies, but prevents a lot of PoS fraud. It could prevent credit fraud if banks allowed me to require the card to take a loan in my name, or to make a transfer larger than $10, and provided the card identity check service to each other and to credit unions. Phones with NFC can read bank cards, so it's a good way to say "it's me, I confirm" in a secure way.
Evolutionary, opt-in, piecemeal solutions often have higher chances to succeed than abrupt all-at-once changes.
They absolutely do, but most of the immigrants have a form of ID that gives the companies some measure of deniability. As long as the I-9 goes through, not my problem. If it doesn't, well that's where contractors come in. Official numbers say around 14 million illegal immigrants. Reasonable estimates are closer to 22 and some non-hyperbolic estimates go as high as 40 million.
Otherwise there's no protection against impersonation if IDs aren't mandatory.
Imagine having a bunch of ID cards in you wallet, like you already have (driver's license, library card, office access card, store loyalty card) that all have interoperable smartcard interface, and a QR code of their built-in public key.
They would be much like contactless bank cards you also keep in your wallet.
Banks and phone network operators are uniquely positioned to sell a validation service for such cards, being highly connected and already having data about their existing customers, which would be an easy initial audience pool.
Kind of like RealID[0]? It exists right now in the US.
Big one, but even though employing illegal immigrants is a crime, it's almost never prosecuted.
One doesn’t need to be anti-government to fear governmental intrusion on one’s rights without due process. Our current government does that now.
agree and second -- history shows that this sort of thing goes badly due to "humans"
Any proposal for modern ID needs to have Constitutional protections, checks, and balances or it will eventually devolve into a digital police state.
Everyone's like "a government went on and extermination campaign" and for some reason what would've stopped them is the difficulty in identifying who to exterminate?
As though genocides much care about accuracy.
The big secret of Nazi Germany that isn't a secret at all I is that they put a lot more then just Jews in those camps.
My point is to not make it easier for them.
Figures like 29 million (not to mention 113 million, which would hardly leave anyone in the USSR) are simply not credible. I suspect the 29 million figure comes from counting the victims of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, but those deaths are on Germany's balance.
If you think the holodomor and red terror only killed a couple million people, I've got some beachfront property to sell you in Idaho.
That depends on the type of attack you're protecting against. It might prevent an attacker from filing your taxes for you, but many companies are still going to use this kind of information as primary key. But it's not going to stop an attacker from pretending to be a bank employee, calling a genuine bank employee via a secret internal-only number, and claiming they've got Mr. Doe in their branch trying to do a critical transaction but their phone broke so they can't use the bank app. Yeah, the Mr. Doe living at 987 Main Street, that one. See, you even verified their ID, and it has a SSN of 123456 printed on it - just compare that to our customer database to make sure it's legit!
It also opens up a whole new type of attack. The problem with those smart cards is that there isn't really a way for the user to know what operation is actually happening. You're using a regular PC or smartphone to interface between the smart card and whatever entity you're trying to communicate with. But that could just as well be a phishing website pretending to be that entity, or malware doing a MitM. Or even just a random website pretending to need a signature for "age verification" when it's actually applying for a loan behind the scenes.
There's no "Do you really want to sign over your house to XYZ?" message on the card itself. And suddenly the government/bank/whatever is getting a request with a cryptographic signature which can obviously only be made by you - why would they have to double-check it if it cannot possible be fraudulent?
I agree that we should be moving to more secure systems, but those ID smart cards aren't a one-size-fits-all solution.
It's not like it's rocket science to have the reader application detail what the request is used for, and encoding it in the request/response, verified when used, so that it can't be used for anything but the approved purpose.
The reader application can, sure, but what ensures that that "reader application" is genuine and can't be subverted? The card's own processor is supposedly tamperproof, but all the display etc. is in the reader which is probably owned and controlled by whatever third-party you're identifying yourself to, or at best it's a random application running on your PC/phone with whatever malware you have.
What you're describing requires the actual terminal you're interacting with to be malicious, and it can only be used to authorize individual transactions.
As things stand in the US, a much broader class of attacks are not only possible but common, in which the attacker takes over the identify of the victim and can authorize any number of transactions in their name.
If the ID is on your phone, you can make it so that the transaction details have to be digitally signed by the person authorizing them in order to be valid. Then, if 3€ shows up on your phone, that's what you're authorizing, not 300€.
Nothing advanced is required. And sure, your phone can be hacked, but there’s only so much fearmongering to go around.
My country's version uses separate mechanisms with separate passwords for "identify me, revealing my name/DoB/number" and "sign something". Obviously not impossible to pretend that you're signing an innocuous document and have you sign something else, but it at least removes some of the low-hanging fruit.
Going after data brokers seems like low hanging fruit, and necessary even if the ID system needs to be replaced. This is a top level issue that need to be addressed regardless.
While I think it’d be great to design a system where the information you mention is harmless (I’m curious how this would work without just shifting the problem to whatever new identifier is established), the reality is that this information is not harmless, and will continue to be dangerous to leak for the foreseeable future due to the myriad of systems that use this data in its current form. Any theoretical project to replace this would likely be a long and drawn out undertaking. Addressing the information environment in the meantime seems like a good idea.
Even just name, DOD and last 4 of the SS number and you are done.
It's ridiculous.
We should fix the problem and ban the data-sources. Whack-a-mole makes it sound like we're talking about a ban on one company, but what clearly needs to be done is a categorical ban on super sketchy business practices, and that seems simple enough. Data-brokers, if they are going to exist at all, need to accept the burden of proof to establish that every single row involves consent, and they need to acquire new consent for every single resale of the information. If that makes the whole industry unprofitable, too fucking bad. And if this looks bad for business, it gets even worse: good luck getting consent for reselling what is mine without offering me a cut.
Since the above kind of common sense looks crazy these days, let's throw in something even more radical. For anyone looking to fund UBI, ^ here's a start. The trouble with the often-mentioned idea of "tax the data" as a solution for privacy concerns is that these taxes are just redistributing wealth from corporations to governments, while all of profit is made with our information. Who wants the monetized details of their personal life to pay for the next unjust war, or even the roads in some place they don't live. If we are so valuable, put some of that money back in our hands, and if the price doesn't sound fair to us, then let us opt out of the sale.
The government now knows what we do most of the time anyway: layer-2 logs on our phones are constant. We lost any privacy some time ago. So now, getting security back might be a net win.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-13/trust-exchange-digita...
So i imagine the "Number of people driven to suicide" KPI is going to be pretty high. They're not going to want to ship something that performs worse.
But I am by tendency an optimist, and the open-source part (if they do that) means we can have eyes on their crypto assumptions behind the protocol and whats on the device.
MyGovID, which I think they're baking into it has been pretty solid. thats distinct from your mygov account, many of which have been hacked, in part because so few people used MyGovID.
(if you've got better info always happy to see it)
The execs are mostly the same. the product contracts run by the same people and even the minister is now the same again. they have no interest in changing or correcting.
Huh?
If your phone is on, your position in time and space to some circular error is also known, continuously.
To say nothing of Bluetooth that's with the advertising hoardings and inside the store mainly.
Basically, any privacy nut with a phone and simcard is in denial.
https://paulgraham.com/founders.html
> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
While scoped to founders, I think it broadly applies to a subset of curious people who are wired to solve problems, imho.