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Comment by throwaway290 | Hacker News Reader

Also, if it's easy to check your ID, there will be more and more checks of your ID. And that's not great...

It also normalizes in the public eye the notion that conventional ID's deserve suspicion, and pushes the Overton window, in the US context, further in the direction of accepting that LEO's can and should be jailing people solely on their personal suspicions about ID authenticity.

A person without an iPhone (or not utilizing it fully) does not deserve suspicion. It's not a crime to opt out of the mainstream iPhone sociology. It is not right to treat a person who is e.g. elderly, or for some other reason has "fallen" behind the digital divide, as an inferior person with fewer rights and privileges.

It's reliably in tech peoples' blind spot, when thinking about how to make things "efficient" for the common case, one that reflects their own experience, to not think or care about the less-common cases that don't affect them. See: digital-only payments[0]. But being banned from shopping in a few hipster stores is a small thing compared to being wrongly jailed!

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cashless

> It is not right to treat a person who is e.g. elderly, or for some other reason has "fallen" behind the digital divide, as an inferior person with fewer rights and privileges.

While it may not be moral, our entire world and society are set up to treat folks with more resources as superior people with more rights and privileges. Poorer folks fall behind the digital curve just as readily as they fall behind the professional, educational, etc. ones. Who you are born as and where that takes place is still one of the driving factors of your rights and privileges. It's certainly noble to fight that (just to be clear that I'm not arguing for digital IDs as somehow valid because the rest of the system is already unjust).

> While it may not be moral, our entire world and society are set up to treat folks with more resources as superior people with more rights and privileges.

I don't know about that. Ability to buy more != superiority and rights and privileges.

I know a bunch of people who disdain the ultra rich and see them as the opposite of superior if anything. And rights are the same for everyone...

While morality is a different discussion for sure, I was only referring to how society as an organism views people. The wealthy undeniably have more rights and privilege than the poor.

privilege yes, but rights... maybe in some societies, but I wouldn't generalize

Do you have an example?

do YOU have an example? rights are the same for everyone is in probably every constitution and sorta default;)

An example from me wouldn’t disprove your claim that there are places with equal rights across the board. E.g. in the US it’s clear that the wealthy have rights granted via political donations. That doesn’t prove or disprove your claim. I hesitate to even mention such examples for fear of a response being more focused in it than the claim you made.

I am ok if you say "people with more money live better lives" but if you say "people with more money have more rights" is a bomb statement because "rights" means something specific and legally important.

Your statements make more sense then. You are only concerned with a specific set of rights.

I live in one of the countries where id is mandatory to have and to carry.

Not counting times when id was exchanged for another id, I believe I was asked to show the physical card maybe twice (in six years), one of those was for voting, the was in healthcare. Guess how white I am, lol.

Digital thingy zo, that needs button pressing every time I log into whatever government or goverment-related things.

So you are kind of right

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