In the U.S., identity providing is not a role the government fills. Not everyone has to have a passport, for example. A passport is merely a purpose-specific tool for crossing borders, not general identity.
I think often people mess up the subjects of privacy, freedom and a government provided id. You can have privacy and freedom even if you have a government issued id. And you can have your privacy and freedom taken away from you without the government giving you standardized way of proving your id.
People might be more amenable if SSO wasn’t implemented as these stupid OIDC flows where the govt gets to know every time you login to your bank and what IP you’re using, etc.
Apart from regime changes, being a functional democratic society doesn’t protect you from technical incompetence nor does it limit the ability for people with access to the DB from abusing it.
Why not? Anonymous cryptographic attestation methods (e.g. of only the fact that you are over 18 years old, that you are a permanent resident etc.) exist.
These days, every smartphone with an ISO 1443 interface ("NFC") can act as a reader.
Driver's licenses (or non-driver IDs) are the US's de facto ID standard.
Your root of trust for said bank id is gov't documents, right?
Some stuff like voting you can use something like a utility bill. Some stuff will want your birth certificate. Some stuff will want multiple types of documents.
Americans have historically been against mandated government IDs (though mostly with the concept of a federal/national ID).
My employer requires an SSN when I start a job. TSA keeps alleging they're going to require Real ID any day now. Voting, if I have my jurisdiction's requirements right, requires an SSN, though most people will experience that in the form of driver's license, since getting a license is usually automatic voter registration where I've lived.
I could get a Real ID that reads "1060 W Addison St" today. All I have to do is pirate Acrobat, change the addresses on PDFs downloaded from the websites of my bank and power company, and walk into an Illinois Secretary of State office, as that's enough for the residency portion of a Real ID. They do not double-check any of this information, and I know this works because I had to edit a power bill PDF so my SO would have a second document for proof of residency. All it would take is one phone call to find out I'm the only one listed on the account, but it was never verified.
Why anyone thinks a federal ID would enable mass surveillance and tracking is beyond me. The NSA doesn't need a unified federal ID to track us, and law enforcement isn't exactly foiled by people who hold fake IDs or who have no IDs whatsoever (unless being undocumented or Amish is some magical "get out of jail free" card).
I'm very paranoid about tracking and privacy, but the reality is that identity verification is just a necessary part of some services. Like opening a brokerage account, or riding a plane. So, if we HAVE to do it, we should have a more secure way of doing it. There's no reason we should be relying on easily-gathered 9 digit numbers.