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Comment by PartiallyTyped | Hacker News Reader

Denmark does it by sending you to a government-owned website, which then uses two factor authentication and responds back verifying one’s identity.

I don’t understand why other countries can’t do the same.

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The UK doesn’t have any form of identity that can be used like this. There’s a very very vocal group of people who oppose the idea to the point that it hasn’t gained traction.

I wouldn't describe myself as a very very vocal person, but I'm not a fan of the UK introducing identity cards as it would almost certainly be misused by the government and the data would be leaked as the UK government is utterly incompetent (when it comes to computers).

Yeah. They left unencrypted child (benefits?) information on a train once.

There's three groups:

First, a vocal minority of security freaks lead by Tony Blair who think that forcing everybody to carry ID cards around is a proportionate way to protect Britain from terrorists, illegal immigrants and other foes.

Second, a large proportion of the country who think that the introduction of optional ID cards is a slippery slope towards the first group getting what they want.

Third, another large proportion of people who think that the risk of the first group getting what they want is overblown, or else think that the convenience of being able to prove identity more easily outweighs the inconvenience of having to carry an ID card around everywhere.

In the great ID card battle of the late-00s, the second group won decisively and politicians have been too scared to take up the issue ever since. Except for Blair, but having the face of your political campaign be a war criminal is of negative value to that cause.

Voter ID rears its ugly head.

It's compulsory now so it's doable. Especially since voter registers are available to certain companies* regardless of the voters' consent.

*eg political parties, credit bureaus.

The Netherlands has this system but it is ripe for abuse. We still have a few Christ clowns and there's a big fascist party at the moment.

How about we don't make lists of people visiting porn sites? How about we accept that children are part of society and not try to put them in little cages like songbirds?

Tangential discussion, one thing I like a lot about the Netherlands is that it's not common to flaunt wealth, at least not as much as in some other countries. For all their other flaws, isn't this something that comes from the protestants? Or is there a different historical background here?

I am fairly certain it can be done in a zero-knowledge way, but regardless, parents should be taking care of this.

Children are part of society, but adults need to have their space to do their adult things, some of which are actually hurting children. The "little cages" are actually supposed to aid a healthy mental development.

But whatever age-verification solution I have seen so far sucked, really badly. And I can't believe people promote something like a government based age check. People need their privacy.

>How about we accept that children are part of society and not try to put them in little cages like songbirds?

It's the correct idea but the way it should be done is by coming to a democratic consensus that helicopter parenting is bad, not by attempting to hobble the infrastructure of government. If only for the practical reason that it'll simply be outsourced and privatized. In US states where the police can't scan license plates, there's a private industry doing that and then selling the data back to the police. The same result but now you pay a premium.

Lee Kuan Yew was fond of making this point. Weak "horizontal" administrations will creep in ways that are more opaque and without checks than strong "vertical" ones.

One reason that's better is that private companies aren't backed by the force of law the same way police are. I don't think it's a felony to prevent some random company's spy camera from seeing your license plate but it is illegal to prevent the police from seeing it. (Of course it's illegal to generally obscure it so there's some implementation details to be worked out there)

The US in particular doesn't have a national identity system in the first place because the Republican party has opposed the concept for a long timr for various reasons both ideological ("mark of the beast" claims are less of a thing these days but have been made in the past) and political (having a patchwork of systems makes voter suppression and stochastic disenfranchisement of undesireables easier). Without that, any kind of unified verification system is very unlikely to happen.

It's worth being careful with broad characterizations like this. Attributing complex policy opposition to fringe beliefs or bad faith motives oversimplifies the issue and shuts down good faith discussion. Whatever one’s views, that kind of framing isn’t helpful.

But in this case it's absolutely true -- I've yet to see any other reason for Republicans to be opposed to national IDs. Have you?

The funny thing is voter suppression doesn't actually help either party consistently over time. Right now the marginal voter is Republican, and so are all the "low-information" voters (this is the polite term politics people use for, you know.)

So voter ID laws would make them lose every election. But of course, that's not permanent either.

Would Passports not be considered a "national identity system"?

No. They're designed around citizenship, not just identity, and the system is slow, relatively expensive, and increasingly hostile to trans people or anyone else who doesn't fit neat categories that aren't actually necessary for an identity system.

This is a first step to shutting down anonymous accounts - here in Russia for example the account must be linked at least to a phone number or to a government ID and I see no reason why other governments don't want to do the same.

In Germany it's not the case, but in Germany they have to store your IP address, and your IP address records are linked to your passport. It is illegal to get an Internet connection without a responsible party. The person who provides their passport is liable for all misuse no matter who did it. Public wifi was effectively illegal in Germany until recently due to this rule, until a special exception was made for public wifi but the rule is otherwise still in place.

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