Comment by stavros

Digital ID is fine if it is a choice of citizen if to use it or not, without any consequences - soft or hard. It is convenient to use, and can streamline processes.

If physical ID gets heavily discouraged and Digital ID gets mandated for everything, you basically have to keep a tracking device(a phone, which already fulfills that role) that is now tied to government records. Location, who do you meet, your contacts, when do you access your bank etc - all of that can be exposed extremely easily. The ease of access is the problem - as normally law enforcement needs to go through lengthy process to access such data across multiple vendors - but now all it takes is just storing metadata about access to Id Portal, and can do so in bulk.

Now they have it in single place - and in most cases - no code is open source, with no way to verify if it even does what it promised to even if it was open source.

The issue is that even if you have 100% trust in current government, you are one election away from a change to something vastly different. Always ask yourself this question when a law is proposed:

- would I be fine with this legislation if the government in charge represented everything I hate?

But no one should use sign in with google.

Are you saying that it's 100% garanteed optional in all situations? It has no power to be used to control or even coerce you or discriminate against you or build a profile and track you which can be used at a later date by a different party when a new political wind decides it finds you inconvenient? I find all of that hard to believe while still performing the convenience function let alone any legitimate law enforcement function.

I can explain the logic behind it.

The first step you need to take is view a government as a hostile entity. It's not your government, it's occupational government. It's unjust by default and you don't agree with the rules it makes, including immigration and taxes.

Now imagine there are three arms of the government -- the one that collects taxes, the one that administers unemployment benefits and the other, which gives out visa, including family reunification permits.

You, as natural born citizen want to bring another person from the outside as a partner and for that you need to sponsor their visa. Government in their infinite wisdom decided you need to earn a certain amount of income for a certain time to be able to sponsor a partner (otherwise you both will be able to claim benefits). To do so you get a list of unemployment premiums paid from one agency and submit to the other.

Now here is the kicker -- if the government is able to aggregate the data from all the agencies mentioned above, they can better implement their policy, i.e. deny you family reunification visa AND bust your for not paying taxes. To aggregate the data they need to have the primary key to join datasets, including data sets from the governments from other countries (see CRS).

In this imaginary situation you can get your partner a visa and immediately stop working. If the government is able to join datasets, something will automatically trigger and you will get the letter saying visa is revoked.

You can disagree or agree with any specific policy, or you can deny government the capability to implement privacy invading policies.

Think of it as a backslash against tracking by google on all the sites with ad sense, algorithmic feeds and the rest. Maybe gestapo is not sending you gulash tomorrow, but it's symptomatically not great.

Add:

Can the government ask Palantir to join datasets without the primary key? Sure they can and they do, that goes against the same principle as above. Is it better to have civil freedoms and privacy protection that come from literally doing Holocaust? It's better, but it's not on menu yet.

I didn't say this specific system does, some systems might, and those are the ones I'm against. If it's just a login (we have the same in Greece), I'm fine with it.

The ID checks in the UK are an example of something I'm against.

The main concern here is that it will create a narrow bridge (i.e, the digital ID system) between people and various services and opportunities which will make it an easy target for people who wish to wield power against someone.

Perhaps your digital ID is needed to open a bank account, get a phone number, sign up for insurance, etc. Now, suppose some fascist government comes into power. They could start cancelling the digital ID's of people or groups they do not like or are bigotted against. These people start losing access to critical infrastructure.

Now, this could already happen, even with imperfect paper IDs, of course. But by making everything digital, we are reducing societal resilience towards such kind of hostility.

Here in the UK, the government wants:

* ID checks for social media (to protect children)

* A digital ID card, allowing ID check records to be provably linked to the original ID document (to prevent illegal working)

* The police arresting people for posting unfashionable takes on human sexuality to social media

And even if you trust the current government, there are very real fears the next government will be Trump-admiring right wing populists who are eager to upend the status quo.

So if a future government decides you are or have done something undesirable, they have a one-stop shop to remove you from societal participation.

You don't even have to go back to Nazis. Just mention Toeslagenaffair of 2004-2019.

> When the Nazis took over the Netherlands, they relied on the state's exceptional record keeping of individuals to hunt down the undesirables. Many people died that didn't have to die because the bad guys were enabled by the data systems built by the good guys.

In many cases, they looked at the census records; something that most western nations have today anyway.

Let's be real: if your government decides to slaughter an entire class of people in its own borders, there's nothing you as a citizen can do except flee and hope to get out without being caught (or sent back).

We're also seeing how this plays out with ICE in the US: they're doing random street sweeps, and then the burden of proof is on the victim. They're not stopped by the lack of an ID system.

Therefore resistance is always useless?

You kinda prove the point with it. Nazis killed more Jews in places with more complete and accurate population registers too. If the municipality already has a list of all the people in one table and records their faith or ethnic origin you just need to get it.