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Comment by seszett | Hacker News Reader

> I will also never have an electronic ID. We (Switzerland) were dumb enough to vote yes for it but we are giving away our freedoms eventually.

What's the link with the rest though? Your government already knows you, whether your id has your information printed with ink or stored on a chip.

Belgium has had electronic id for decades now and I fail to see how it has taken away any freedom, but it has enabled people to get their official documents online without having to make appointments in person in most cases.

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I think the fear many people have is that digital ID will be required for non-government services as well. I can easily see that happen in the USA and Switzerland is the kind of weird that may also let that sort of thing happen.

With things like age verification becoming mandatory just about everywhere and actual privacy-conscious digital age verification being very difficult, there's definitely a risk towards abuse and badly designed authorization mechanisms (although the EU's open source backend and frontends should make it easy for other countries if they do actually care about privacy).

The kinds of things you want here, and that I think we all do, are hard.

Yes, ideally a trusted intermediary would do something like… read your digital ID (which stiLL doesn’t guarantee it’s you providing it, up to a point), examine a birthdate, and sign an attestation to a liquor store that “this user is 21 or older” without you ever having to fork over your name, address, or biometric details.

The will to enforce such measures, at least in the US, seems low.

This is why the EU is going the app route. You load your ID into an app, and can review on-the-fly what data you're sharing (including a simple "older than 18" token to buy liquor). The app also allows keeping a log of who requested what data, so if you find out in hindsight that your grocery store requested your full name illegally, you can report them.

Enforcement chances in the US, maybe outside of California, do seem low, but at least the "we cannot do it" argument is off the table when the EU has a ready-to-deploy suite on Github for anyone to access. If you don't like the EU, the Yivi (previously IRMA) project implements pretty much the same ecosystem, but in a slightly different way.

Because it will be used by other services. Like google requiring one for you to use their services. That's the problem.

It seems to me as if it would get used by the same services that already require an id, except they would now not require a physical check of the id anymore.

I don’t see that happening in Belgium, though?

You don't? Google already requires ID for developers in Belgium [0], and it's complying with regional laws for age verification [1]. The EU is also starting to look at age verification [2]. I don't see how it's such a stretch that Google may want to expand this further even in the absence of government demands, considering the huge ad/data incentive for them to directly link accounts to IRL identities.

[0]https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

[1]https://www.digitaltrends.com/phones/google-play-store-wants...

[2]https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/blueprint...

> Google already requires ID for developers in Belgium

But it also requires id in France, even for people who don't have an eid. Or in the US, and most likely just about everywhere in the world.

I don't see how this is related in any way to having a chip on an id document.

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