Comment by Lauris100 12 hours ago
Everyone has a smartphone lol - i can tell that living in a country with great digital services is a lot less stressful than in country with no digitization and old school paperwork i have gone through both.
Should everyone be required to use private banks to access e.g. foreign exchange?
The answer is yes: which is why banks are licensed and have ombudsmen. As are telcos.
No modern society is going to maintain a parallel government economy to serve the vanishingly small minority who live in fear of private companies.
Perhaps they should (IDK), but they won't.
> live in fear of private companies
It's not the _concept_ of private companies. It's specific things that those specific companies do. e.g.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...
Meaningful regulation would mean e.g. air-gapped infrastructure so they can't make inadvertent privacy mistakes. And guaranteed service levels, and a service of last resort.
Google have based built a business model without accountability and transparency. Which is fine, as long as we're not forced to use them by the state.
> Should everyone be required to use private banks to access e.g. foreign exchange?
Maybe so, I don't know. Though it is worth remarking that "private" banks in the US really are only semi-private. The (admittedly imperfect) regulations that banks are subject to starts to blur the lines between public and private. Not to mention that there are far more banks than smartphone handset-and-OS makers.
> No modern society is going to maintain a parallel government economy to serve the vanishingly small minority who live in fear of private companies.
This is not the only option (though it would potentially be an option for some sufficiently-powerful societies). Other options could include:
1. Multilateral coalitions to do some combination of specify/design/build smartphones and/or their OS
2. Specify a set of user rights and regulate smartphone handset and OS manufacturers accordingly
As a sibling commenter said, this isn't about living in fear of private companies as such. It's about not wanting to be coerced into a system of products that don't preserve liberal rights.
Not everybody wants to carry a smartphone around all the time.
If the ID becomes about more than proving right to work, and becomes a daily carry, it's not hard to see the appeal of a government down the line tapping into an always on-hand microphone, GPS, internet enabled device.
Even putting the tin foil hat aside, I and many people like me enjoy leaving the phone at home, and want as little time spent on the thing as possible.
> fully charged battery.
Yup. Look at train tickets in England. For now it's a convenience but you'll notice the law hasn't kept up with the push to have tickets on phones: the law still says you must produce on demand a ticket when requested. So if your battery runs out or your phone crashes or the app glitches or you've annoyed the "safety" department of Google/Apple... it's entirely your problem
A moody ticket inspector is under no obligation really to give you a few minutes to sort it out
The vast majority of people after 65 or so are incapable of using modern smartphones beyond extremely simple things like calling.
Digital is more convenient at the loss of privacy. And no, absolutely not, NOT everyone has a smartphone nor can use one. Go read the thread on teaching iPhones to seniors.
Not everyone has a smartphone. A substantial number of especially older people don't. Plus poor people, and just.. well, offline people whose lives are much more communal than ours. The requirement for a hundreds-of-units-of-currency device to prove who you are is bonkers.
But this isn't a conversation about people being excluded from the latest JS framework, this is a conversation about people not using a smartphone being increasingly excluded from pretty fundamental things. App only tickets for public transportation? Grandma can't do that. E-voting? Grandma can't do that. Online banking? Grandma can't do that, because grandma struggles to send a text message much less to navigate a modern app with five different dickbars that is outright designed to get people to sign up for marketing trash.
Having an option for digital ID is great, and there are many potential benefits to it. Requiring a modern smartphone for it is wildly out of touch.
>Second, you're on the wrong forum complaining that people need a device to do things in life.
I think it's exactly right forum, because we know how unreliable and unmagical are those things and are in a good position to judge the risk of relying on them too much.
If smartphones are to be a requirement for participation in civil society, privacy- and freedom-preserving smartphones are needed at the very least. People shouldn't be required to submit to some company's Terms of Service in order to participate in society.