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Comment by ifh-hn | Hacker News Reader

I don't have an issue with ID schemes. I have a driving license, passport, veterans card, veterans train card. My issue with this is:

1. Given all the above forms of id I currently have, what's the point of me having a digital one.

2. The assumption I'd have a smartphone for this crap to be tied to.

I can already prove who I am, and since I don't use my mobile for id, banking, or anything more that an on the go web browser, audio book/music player why would I even use this?

As for stopping illegal workers? This could be done with existing processes if they were correctly enforced, and/or existing firms of id.

This government is a joke. They didn't win the election, they just happened to benefit from reform killing the conservative vote. The conservatives were and are a joke, reform are worse and labour are just a useless. I despair for the UK.

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> Given all the above forms of id I currently have, what's the point of me having a digital one.

The issue is that none of those can be really used online, except the passport if used on an NFC-enabled device.

This means services that need identity verification for legitimate reasons like banks, interacting with the government for sensitive matters like tax refunds/benefits/etc and so on can't actually verify your identity; so they either have to spend money on snake oil like "fraud protection", bullshit camera-based document verification combined with credit reference agencies (a whole other privacy nightmare), or they have to make you visit in-person and maintain facilities to do so.

Being able to prove your identity cryptographically would be a significant advantage and remove the need for a lot of parasites like "fraud protection" services, CRAs, etc. You could actually do legally-binding signatures online, removing the need for security theatre such as paper documents (which are trivial to falsify, but enough people don't know how to use Paint that there is belief they are secure enough).

You can use Paint to forge official documents good enough for them to pass? That's some skill!

Like I said I'm not against forms of ID. If this was available and made stuff for me easier and wasn't tied to a device I'd use it, just like passkeys.

Unfortunately this will be tied to smartphones and that's if it actually works. I also have a suspicion it will be overly complicated and massively over budget, and likely fail. The digital equivalent of HS2.

> Paint to forge official documents good enough for them to pass? That's some skill!

I was thinking more about signatures on paper documents. There's been many times I had to pretend to print a PDF I just received, sign it and scan it. Obviously I've just overlaid my signature with a Paint-like tool. This idiocy appears to be widespread enough that open-source projects exist to make more convincing renditions: https://github.com/erstazi/falsisign

> If this was available and made stuff for me easier and wasn't tied to a device I'd use it, just like passkeys.

Ideally it would be NFC/smartcard based, with optional smartphone integration (you can bootstrap a virtual time-limited copy of it from a physical one).

> I also have a suspicion it will be overly complicated and massively over budget, and likely fail. The digital equivalent of HS2.

Oh yeah obviously, this is the UK we're talking about; but in theory the idea is nice and would save a lot of headaches if done well (also remove the need for some parasitic industries like fraud protection or credit reference agencies, so another reason why it probably won't succeed).

Apathy won the last UK election and we defaulted to a Labour government.

They now seem determined to introduce this digital ID system regardless of how unpopular it is.

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