Ask HN: Should governments become identity providers

I dare to say the right question to ask is a different one:

When does something officially become recognised infrastructure?

Streets, power supply, water, and now we are actually facing the question if the internet should be part of the default infrastructure we expect.

This poses several questions and issues, such as identity but also e.g. storage of data. Think of all the SaaS products, and what happens if they go out of business.

What happens to your data? In a more broader view this means, who owns the data? You, the provider, the state, nobody?

Neither a government, nor a private company make the ideal issuer of identities. The only trusted person for issuing and updating your Identity is you.

Please Google/wiki self-sovereign-Identity.

Whether a government should or not is an argument that will probably not be settled anytime soon- not a whole lot of data yet to bolster either side.

But Estonia, through e-Residency and other initiatives, is largely trying exactly that. They've met with some failures and some successes. Human beings are still pretty new at this "government" thing.

No, they can easily masquerade as you to get access to your data. In the real world they can't send someone to pretend to be you, but digitally? It's too easy.

Here's a different take on it: in my country, the government is already roughly an identity provider -- drivers licenses, passports and birth certificates are commonly required as identification when signing up for things like rental agreements, jobs, bank accounts, etc. These are issued by state or federal government.

Yes, this isn't implemented as something you can integrate with over the internet using SAML 2.0 or oauth or whatever, but it still happens with much older tech (writing + paper + anti-counterfeiting tricks + bureaucracy).

James C. Scott's book "Seeing Like a State" makes a pretty good argument that the state wants to arrange society in such a way that it is legible and tractable to central bureaucracy in such a way that the state can efficiently pursue the state's goals -- collecting taxes or crushing political dissent or so on.

So separately from if the state "should" do it, or if it is a "good idea" or not, the state will do it if they think it will help the state achieve its aims, and the population or some other powerful party doesn't resist it.