What do governments need to implement? They already give you a passport which can be used as a digital ID.
- Belongs to exactly one real person.
- That a person cannot own more than one of.
- That is unique per-service.
- That cannot be tied to a real-world identity.
- That can be used by the person to optionally disclose attributes like whether they are an adult or not.
Services generally don’t care about knowing your exact identity but being able to ban a person and not have them simply register a new account, and being able to stop people from registering thousands of accounts would go a long way towards wiping out inauthentic and abusive behaviour.
I think DID is one effort to solve this problem, but I haven’t looked into it enough to know whether it’s any good:
I’m currently working on a social network that utilises passports to ensure account uniqueness. I’m aware that folks can have multiple passports, but it will be good enough to ensure that abuse is minimal and real humans are behind the accounts.
I hope that enough are willing to if the benefits and security are explained plainly enough. For example, I don’t intend to store any passport info, just hashes. So there should be no risk, even if the DB leaks.
Second, how much of the passport information do you hash that it's not reversible? If you know some facts about your target (imagine a public figure), could an attacker feasibly enumerate the remaining info to check to see if their passport was registered in your database? For example, there are only 2.6 billion possible American passport numbers, so if you knew the rest of Taylor Swift's info, you could conceivably use brute-force to see if she's in your database. As a side effect, you'd now know her passport number, as well.
That doesn't even matter. You could hash the whole passport and the passport could contain a UUID and the hash db would still be usable to correlate identities with accounts, because the attacker could separately have the victim's complete passport info. Which is increasingly likely the more sites try to use passports like this, because some won't hash them or will get breached sufficiently that the attackers can capture passport info before it gets hashed and then there will be public databases with everybody's complete passport info.
I’ll have to think about that. Perhaps I can get away with not tying the passport hash to a particular user.
Yes, and this seems like a huge missed opportunity for Dems. I would strongly support such a system, and I would be willing to temper my opposition to Voter ID laws if they were introduced after such a system was implemented fully.
But it's a hilarious sign of worldwide government incompetence that social insurance or other citizen identification cards are not standard, free, and uniquely identifiable and usable for online ID purposes (presumably via some sort of verification service / PGP).
Government = people and laws. Government cannot even reliably ID people online. You had one job...
In addition, there's a strong conservative history of using voter id as a means of voter suppression and discrimination. This, in turn, has made the blue side immediately skeptical of identification laws - even if they would be useful.
So, now the anti-ID stuff is coming from everywhere.
Feel free to find other sources too.
Many Americans do not have ID. I don't know why that's so controversial to say.
You don't need an ID to get a job, or rent, or do much of anything. Typically, a bill + address suffices.
You're correct SOME states offer ID that IS NOT a Driver's License. However, there's no reason to get this - why would you? Again, you don't need it for anything so why bother?
America is a very diverse nation, and people live very different lives across the country. Yet all of them have a right to vote. I would expect that 99+% of people on this site have government-issued IDs, but we in the 1% of technical expertise here.
Listen to the stories of people who were affected by the Hurricane in western North Carolina last week and you can start to understand how different some people's lives are.
In NY, you can register with ID, last 4 digits of your social, or leave it blank. If you leave it blank, you will need to provide some sort of identification when voting, but a utility bill in your name and address will suffice.
Singapore does this. Everybody who is resident in Singapore gets an identity card and a login for Singpass – an OpenID Connect identity provider that services can use to obtain information like address and visa status (with user permission). There’s a barcode on the physical cards that can be scanned by a mobile app in person to verify that it’s valid too.