I dunno man, I migrated to the Netherlands and our digital ID is an amazing system that literally makes my life easier anytime i need to interact with something.
An open standard for the world to use for this seems like the ideal way you would want it to happen.
I also personally think we are going to need some form of digital id and hopefully some sort of attribute based credential implementation à la the DECODE project[1], where we can start raising the barrier of entry for all of these bot farms to require at least a felony in identity theft to start.
Dutch digid is tightly coupled with your address. All documents only go via regular post to your registered address in the Netherlands. No address? Moved to another one? Didn't register new address? Moved out of country? Good luck getting or updating digid.
Digid verification goes to your phone. Lost phone or get stolen? Changed mobile number? Guess what, no digid for you anymore.
Agreed, all the scaremongering is hilarious. As if a digital ID is what is going to be used to repress the common (wo)man.
News flash, if your "liberal western government" wanted to they have more than enough tools to do it already. See all the repressive governments with institutions stuck in the 60s.
- Don't trust corporations that you have no control over.
- Vote wisely for the government you do have some control over.
- Accept compromises are needed in a society of millions rather than constant political conflict.
This article is written from an anarcho-socialist perspective so it may not be that persuasive to many people.
In the US we don't have any official government digital ID but instead various data brokers are providing it... with no real oversight. If the people of the UK reject government digital ID they may get Palantir digital ID instead. It's not clear to me which is worse, the government playing by its own rules or private companies playing by essentially no rules. Europe may be better because at least they have GDPR.
I hate these fluff pieces that use "Digital ID" as some nebulous thing that represents everything from a social credit system to a mandatory id card to a location tracking device injected the spine of every citizen.
Why is there suddenly so much talk about vague implementations of Digital ID? Is it because of the UK proposals? No one seems to know exactly what that amounts to either - but importantly it seems to be nothing like what people in the rest of Europe mean when we say "Digital ID".
If you want to discuss "Digital ID" - or write a long blog post about it - then please just describe what it is you are writing about. Don't use it as a label for everything you don't want.
The author asserts that reports have documented deaths of starvation due to Aadhaar identification issues. That seems pretty extreme and horrifying. The author doesn’t cite their source for that claim—is anyone familiar with the underlying work?
> While the government remains in denial about the deaths highlighted by Right to Food activists, the Minister admits that Santoshi Kumar, 11, died because her family ration card was deleted for not being linked to Aadhaar. Taramani Sahu, a foot soldier of the Right to Food Campaign, says she had raised this issue with the district authorities months before Santoshi died. The administration assured intervention, but that came only after the child’s death.
Jharkhand has the most of these, due to the underlying issues and activism on Right to Food in the region.
I also remember a case where an infant Aadhaar was issued by CSC at the hospital and was celebrated as a win because the doctors refused emergency Heart Surgery without the infant having an Aadhaar.
it's not that without digital ID you didn't need verification. At least in Italy, digital identities means don't having to go attending lengthy queues in public offices, where paper identities where usually checked. Sometimes you still have to do it.
What I agree with, is that some system is needed to help those without an identity, or at the border of the system. Digital stuff can help there too.
I think privacy abuse can be largely prevented if a hard line is drawn saying that digital ids must only be used by the government for government services, such as voting, taxes, immigration, welfare, etc.
If any private parties like banks, social media, or online stores are allowed to check your digital id, they are going to be a privacy disaster.
The bouncer saying I need to see your ID always rubbed me up the wrong way, not because I objected to being challenged but because they don’t need to know who I am, they just need to see proof of age. Not even that! Proof that my age is greater than or equal to X!
In a world where we would might actually see societal benefits in having people prove things about themselves*, could we not leverage technology to emit verifiable tokens that say “I have the right to work” and “my eyeballs have this shape and are this far apart”** without the world turning into 1984?
(I suppose with enough people there could still be a black market for token generators where you could feasibly buy one that matched a subset of your biometrics.)
* Illegals have the potential to be exploited just as much they themselves can be exploitative. It goes both ways.
** Is it possible to have biometrics that can be verified against my physical presence, but which can’t be used to identify me in a crowd?
As a privileged European, I am not primed to fully engage with this point of view. The "pro digital id" arguments of freedom appeal to me, for instance it means it's easier for me to have secure, reliable access to my medical data.
That being said, I do appreciate that it must look very different when you don't get access to it, especially when so much of travel and government assistance relies on it. Our digital Id solutions definitely still have accessibility issue for instance. And I do believe that in some societies, it can be (and maybe is) used as a "boot to the neck".
I would say the main goal should be to make it easier for anyone to obtain and use the benefits of these tools, but that it relies on a society where the government protects personal freedom of movement as necessary.
I think a digital id in concept is fine but will ultimately be used to exploit or exclude people from the system.
A digital id can be great but it needs some extra decorations to make it better suited to being used in the wild. Some thoughts:
What happens if "the system is offline"? No healthcare that day? No transactions? What are the effects of downtime, whether intentional or cause by hackers etc?
What happens in countries with low literacy rates? Some people cannot read or write, some countries use paper only, how will you travel to those countries?
On privacy abuse, I think there should be an app alongside the digital id, that when a third party requests information, I get the request and I have to approve it. It should have an expiry date attached so that the third party has to delete their records. I should be able to see exactly what data they request. What happens if the system is offline?
A digital id can eliminate many cases where people have to "trust" each other and they would rather rely on the system instead. Lets say the bank asks me to give them certified copies of my id or statements from a different party. Many fraud occur as people can forge documents, so with a digital id, this whole step gets eliminated as the bank can simply ask the gov for the information so they don't have to trust me or that the documents are valid.
Some laws might be needed to ensure that you are forced to keep your data up to date, so that when someone needs to request your home address (as an example, an attorney might need it), they should be able to get an up to date address.
But still, all round with how things are at the moment, such a system WILL be abused, especially by special interest groups, politicians, scammers etc. Technically feasible but the specific society might not be compatible with the convenience it brings.
My digital ID in the western European country I live in is great, it also works offline. There's no extra information the government has that it didn't already have. Everything is the same, except now I don't have to carry a physical card with me all the time, I just need my phone and I can switch to a new phone easily.
I don't disagree with the concerns of the author, but to me it seems that the response should be to wage war against chokepoint capitalism, i.e, third party tech oligopolies which might own the critical infrastructure to Digital ID databases and the verification systems, not Digital ID itself
So .. back in the day I was active in the no2id campaign against UK identity cards. Since then the UK has introduced mandatory ID and immigration status check requirements for banking, renting, employment, and voting .. but not issued any new forms of ID, apart from the short lived immigrant-only "Biometric residence permit".
The ID question splits into two halves:
1) ID requirements: situations where you cannot proceed without presenting ID
2) ID issuance: issuing an ID to comply with (1)
People here, and the thin liberal/libertarian side of UK politics, are quite against (2) because they think it will lead to (1). But it turns out to be very easy to impose (1)_in half-assed and inconvenient ways even without (2). We just got "identify yourself to use social media"! That's already happened, except the people you are identifying yourself to are random non-GDPR US data broker services which are almost certainly cc'ing US intelligence on a copy of all the faces you show them.
(2) is where the real fight is, and now we've mostly lost that (because the public wants authoritarianism so long as it's used primarily against The Other), not having (1) becomes a matter of dealing with an inconvenient and broken pseudo-ID system where "utility bill" is a valid form of ID and organizations may require things that no longer exist like "original printed bank statement".
Having grown up in South Africa, having a physical document to prove who you are, along with an identity number is just so normalised. When I moved to the UK later in life, I found it absolutely bizarre that there’s no mechanism to uniquely identify yourself to the government, or any other entity that deals with your personal/financial/health identity. It’s just a combination of name and address, which anyone can access with ease.
Digital identity is on the slightly more controlling side of this, but the article focuses entirely on the cynical perspective without considering the positives.
I'm in South Africa and working for an Australian company. I still find it weird that they don't have ID numbers, instead we make use of a name + surname + DoB combination.
I didn't even know it was like that in the UK as well or anywhere else to be honest, I always just assumed everyone makes use of government issued ID's.
The government is not capitalist. No where in the Constitution will you see a mention of capitalism. Communist states however organize their governments around their economic system necessarily.
I don't know why people complain much about it. In UK especially. For example all EU citizens, after Brexit been "marked", with sort of digital ID.
1. You cannot open bank account without presenting share code from gov.uk, which shows your photo and right to stay and work when generated.
2. You cannot rent without presenting same share code.
3. You cannot go on cruise ship without presenting that.
4. Employers cannot hire you without presenting that code.
Codes are temporary, you login, generate and share that.
It's very much digital ID that's been in place for many years by now. So getting it to everyone makes sense, either "mark" everyone in a country or "mark" no one. And EU citizens been "marked" for a while and tested on with that system.
Buried in this discussion is the nastier side of UK politics: people (well, marginal voters) want an identity system, but _only_ to inconvenience foreigners.
The issue isn't so much an identification system, or a digital identification system. It's just that we're waiting to see if there's going to be a non-smartphone implementation of this, and we're waiting to find out if this is handled locally or handed to a company like Palantir (which is likely given their cosying up to the UK government).
If this ID is only required at point of reference for job applications, as they are implying, why does it need to be operated via smartphone app? Can it not just be a card, or website? If it's purely digital, what happens in the case of a leak, cyber attack or internet outage?
If the ID grows in purpose in the future, does this mean we'll have to carry smartphones around with us at all times as if it were an extension of our body? You don't have to be much of a conspiracy theorist to take issue with the idea of carrying an internet connected microphone, camera and location tracked device around at all times.
They aren't revealing anything yet. I want the UK to stay a country where you don't need to reveal identification at a whim, as opposed to a country where you must always carry it at all times ready for questioning. I don't want to live in a state where a lack of smartphone is grounds for suspicion of criminal/illegal behaviour.
Right now email is true One True SSO. I suspect that the root of trust for the digital identity of most people here is something like a Gmail account, unless you have gone to vast efforts to secure personal digital sovereignty in terms of having entirely self-hosted domain, email, DNS etc. The question is: in the long run, do you trust your government more than Google?
The word "Capitalist" is casually thrown in with other bad things to make it look bad. Don't be tricked. Capitalism is a good and moral system. In fact, it is the only moral system that works. What's bad is central planning and government surveillance.
Digital ID is logic, in a digital world, what's not logic is centralized digital IDs instead of open, public chain-of-trust ones.
Similar for many other digital things: they could be good or bad depending on how you do them. As long as 99% have no clue of IT it's pretty normal that digitization evolve against the common interests, when people get a bit of knowledge then things change.
theremust be balance in the use of digitised personal records that are availible to officials
first, every single touch on someones info is recorded, and abuse in any form is punished, catestrophicaly.
even the ticket checker, will be monitored, and if there is any discriminatory pattern to there "checking" they are prevented from any job or occupation that involves power ,and authority to prosecute.
2 no ministerial overrides,etc, without a court order
3 if the whole thing becomes unmanageble and leakes private info, it is trashed and we go back to cards
the people pushing this must face catestrophic consequences for failing to impilment a digital sytem of ID that is perfectly secure, and immune from abuse. no mights,no coulds, no excuses, no mumbling,no clauses, no public private, secure national ID, fuck with it and go to jail forever
Well. Yeah. The criticism of digital ID writes itself.
Given the US president’s inflammatory rhetoric about “Democrats” and “radical left”, this passage is an ominous prediction:
“Welfare can be rationed through digital checkpoints, ensuring that only the “deserving” poor receive aid. Policing is strengthened through biometric databases, making dissent and protest more dangerous.”
This mirrors the reasons for resisting Voter ID laws.
And given story after story written here on HN about corporations who are unaccountable for their poor data handling, given digital services routinely deny users fair resolutions for bad algorithmic actions or ambiguous “policy violations” and without human arbitration. (Ha! Or just Byzantine department compartmentalization).
If you’re not chilled by the thought of Universal Digital ID for every single bit of life’s necessities, why no? Are you team Ellison? Do you think there will be room for _you and your family_ on the Ark?
"wielded by states and capitalists to monitor, control, and discipline populations. From passports to colonial passbooks, from welfare cards to border regimes, the apparatus of identification has always been tied to domination."
Uh, what is the word capitalists doing here? All of the examples are of the states.
Notably, most of the states doing those were the least capitalist of all.
In Soviet Union (and Russia) you have an internal passport that you have to carry at all times and show to the cops if asked. You need/used to need a residence permit or some other explanation to be somewhere other than your address stamped in the passport (in fact, earlier they wouldn't give rural people passports at all, so they wouldn't travel). Or btw if your photo is too old you could be taken to a police station. I have been, almost, and the only difference added by capitalism is that you could conveniently pay a bribe on the spot (it was literally the birthday I was supposed to change my photo so I got a free birthday special after some discussion)
I surrendered my internal passport with my Russian citizenship and never had "capitalists" offer me any replacement digital ID! It's jarring, what am I supposed to show to capitalist cops?!
Sure, surveillance, etc. But the author is clearly extremely biased and keeps harping on the sins of Paul to condemn Peter.
34 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 67.2 ms ] threadAn open standard for the world to use for this seems like the ideal way you would want it to happen.
I also personally think we are going to need some form of digital id and hopefully some sort of attribute based credential implementation à la the DECODE project[1], where we can start raising the barrier of entry for all of these bot farms to require at least a felony in identity theft to start.
Curious what others opinions are :)
[1]: https://decodeproject.eu/publications/final-report-pilots-am...
Dutch digid is tightly coupled with your address. All documents only go via regular post to your registered address in the Netherlands. No address? Moved to another one? Didn't register new address? Moved out of country? Good luck getting or updating digid.
Digid verification goes to your phone. Lost phone or get stolen? Changed mobile number? Guess what, no digid for you anymore.
You're betting that the government are always going to be nice to you and those around you, carefully ignoring all the history books.
News flash, if your "liberal western government" wanted to they have more than enough tools to do it already. See all the repressive governments with institutions stuck in the 60s.
- Don't trust corporations that you have no control over. - Vote wisely for the government you do have some control over. - Accept compromises are needed in a society of millions rather than constant political conflict.
Start with the above for a better life.
In the US we don't have any official government digital ID but instead various data brokers are providing it... with no real oversight. If the people of the UK reject government digital ID they may get Palantir digital ID instead. It's not clear to me which is worse, the government playing by its own rules or private companies playing by essentially no rules. Europe may be better because at least they have GDPR.
Why is there suddenly so much talk about vague implementations of Digital ID? Is it because of the UK proposals? No one seems to know exactly what that amounts to either - but importantly it seems to be nothing like what people in the rest of Europe mean when we say "Digital ID".
If you want to discuss "Digital ID" - or write a long blog post about it - then please just describe what it is you are writing about. Don't use it as a label for everything you don't want.
Jharkhand has the most of these, due to the underlying issues and activism on Right to Food in the region.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/death-by...
I also remember a case where an infant Aadhaar was issued by CSC at the hospital and was celebrated as a win because the doctors refused emergency Heart Surgery without the infant having an Aadhaar.
What I agree with, is that some system is needed to help those without an identity, or at the border of the system. Digital stuff can help there too.
If any private parties like banks, social media, or online stores are allowed to check your digital id, they are going to be a privacy disaster.
In a world where we would might actually see societal benefits in having people prove things about themselves*, could we not leverage technology to emit verifiable tokens that say “I have the right to work” and “my eyeballs have this shape and are this far apart”** without the world turning into 1984?
(I suppose with enough people there could still be a black market for token generators where you could feasibly buy one that matched a subset of your biometrics.)
* Illegals have the potential to be exploited just as much they themselves can be exploitative. It goes both ways.
** Is it possible to have biometrics that can be verified against my physical presence, but which can’t be used to identify me in a crowd?
That being said, I do appreciate that it must look very different when you don't get access to it, especially when so much of travel and government assistance relies on it. Our digital Id solutions definitely still have accessibility issue for instance. And I do believe that in some societies, it can be (and maybe is) used as a "boot to the neck".
I would say the main goal should be to make it easier for anyone to obtain and use the benefits of these tools, but that it relies on a society where the government protects personal freedom of movement as necessary.
A digital id can be great but it needs some extra decorations to make it better suited to being used in the wild. Some thoughts:
What happens if "the system is offline"? No healthcare that day? No transactions? What are the effects of downtime, whether intentional or cause by hackers etc?
What happens in countries with low literacy rates? Some people cannot read or write, some countries use paper only, how will you travel to those countries?
On privacy abuse, I think there should be an app alongside the digital id, that when a third party requests information, I get the request and I have to approve it. It should have an expiry date attached so that the third party has to delete their records. I should be able to see exactly what data they request. What happens if the system is offline?
A digital id can eliminate many cases where people have to "trust" each other and they would rather rely on the system instead. Lets say the bank asks me to give them certified copies of my id or statements from a different party. Many fraud occur as people can forge documents, so with a digital id, this whole step gets eliminated as the bank can simply ask the gov for the information so they don't have to trust me or that the documents are valid.
Some laws might be needed to ensure that you are forced to keep your data up to date, so that when someone needs to request your home address (as an example, an attorney might need it), they should be able to get an up to date address.
But still, all round with how things are at the moment, such a system WILL be abused, especially by special interest groups, politicians, scammers etc. Technically feasible but the specific society might not be compatible with the convenience it brings.
The ID question splits into two halves:
1) ID requirements: situations where you cannot proceed without presenting ID
2) ID issuance: issuing an ID to comply with (1)
People here, and the thin liberal/libertarian side of UK politics, are quite against (2) because they think it will lead to (1). But it turns out to be very easy to impose (1)_in half-assed and inconvenient ways even without (2). We just got "identify yourself to use social media"! That's already happened, except the people you are identifying yourself to are random non-GDPR US data broker services which are almost certainly cc'ing US intelligence on a copy of all the faces you show them.
(2) is where the real fight is, and now we've mostly lost that (because the public wants authoritarianism so long as it's used primarily against The Other), not having (1) becomes a matter of dealing with an inconvenient and broken pseudo-ID system where "utility bill" is a valid form of ID and organizations may require things that no longer exist like "original printed bank statement".
Digital identity is on the slightly more controlling side of this, but the article focuses entirely on the cynical perspective without considering the positives.
1. You cannot open bank account without presenting share code from gov.uk, which shows your photo and right to stay and work when generated. 2. You cannot rent without presenting same share code. 3. You cannot go on cruise ship without presenting that. 4. Employers cannot hire you without presenting that code.
Codes are temporary, you login, generate and share that.
It's very much digital ID that's been in place for many years by now. So getting it to everyone makes sense, either "mark" everyone in a country or "mark" no one. And EU citizens been "marked" for a while and tested on with that system.
- we already have some forms of IDs. Most of us have personal ID, driving license, you data exist in government tables
- we already have some forms of IDs online. Everything is stored per email address, and phone address
- this makes some people do not care
- until government starts using it for nefarious reasons. All it takes is one president to change, one super power to shift
- people are ignorant, until it is too late
- the problem with digital ID is with centralization, that it is goldmine for hackers, it can be used to spy on you if all your data are in one bucket
- therefore people who say that they have digital ID lack imagination on what can happen
- it all works, when everything is disconnected, platforms, governments, etc.
If this ID is only required at point of reference for job applications, as they are implying, why does it need to be operated via smartphone app? Can it not just be a card, or website? If it's purely digital, what happens in the case of a leak, cyber attack or internet outage?
If the ID grows in purpose in the future, does this mean we'll have to carry smartphones around with us at all times as if it were an extension of our body? You don't have to be much of a conspiracy theorist to take issue with the idea of carrying an internet connected microphone, camera and location tracked device around at all times.
They aren't revealing anything yet. I want the UK to stay a country where you don't need to reveal identification at a whim, as opposed to a country where you must always carry it at all times ready for questioning. I don't want to live in a state where a lack of smartphone is grounds for suspicion of criminal/illegal behaviour.
Similar for many other digital things: they could be good or bad depending on how you do them. As long as 99% have no clue of IT it's pretty normal that digitization evolve against the common interests, when people get a bit of knowledge then things change.
the people pushing this must face catestrophic consequences for failing to impilment a digital sytem of ID that is perfectly secure, and immune from abuse. no mights,no coulds, no excuses, no mumbling,no clauses, no public private, secure national ID, fuck with it and go to jail forever
Given the US president’s inflammatory rhetoric about “Democrats” and “radical left”, this passage is an ominous prediction:
“Welfare can be rationed through digital checkpoints, ensuring that only the “deserving” poor receive aid. Policing is strengthened through biometric databases, making dissent and protest more dangerous.”
This mirrors the reasons for resisting Voter ID laws.
And given story after story written here on HN about corporations who are unaccountable for their poor data handling, given digital services routinely deny users fair resolutions for bad algorithmic actions or ambiguous “policy violations” and without human arbitration. (Ha! Or just Byzantine department compartmentalization).
If you’re not chilled by the thought of Universal Digital ID for every single bit of life’s necessities, why no? Are you team Ellison? Do you think there will be room for _you and your family_ on the Ark?
https://fortune.com/2025/09/28/larry-ellison-ai-surveillance...
Uh, what is the word capitalists doing here? All of the examples are of the states. Notably, most of the states doing those were the least capitalist of all.
In Soviet Union (and Russia) you have an internal passport that you have to carry at all times and show to the cops if asked. You need/used to need a residence permit or some other explanation to be somewhere other than your address stamped in the passport (in fact, earlier they wouldn't give rural people passports at all, so they wouldn't travel). Or btw if your photo is too old you could be taken to a police station. I have been, almost, and the only difference added by capitalism is that you could conveniently pay a bribe on the spot (it was literally the birthday I was supposed to change my photo so I got a free birthday special after some discussion)
I surrendered my internal passport with my Russian citizenship and never had "capitalists" offer me any replacement digital ID! It's jarring, what am I supposed to show to capitalist cops?!
Sure, surveillance, etc. But the author is clearly extremely biased and keeps harping on the sins of Paul to condemn Peter.