heterodoxia

One of the things I fought (using PIAs) was automated warrantless police access to certain records because the data would get shared with foreign border agencies as part of data agreements, causing the very headaches you imply.

I got shared role accounts banned across a sector, and per-user database lookup transaction logs added to a solution so that at least the breadcrumbs would exist. It cost a lot, including my own renewal on the contract, but a couple years later it caught some pretty bad actors.

The challenge is that the bad stuff happens to the square pegs first, and tech creates a lot of square pegs. If nobody resists, they apply it generally. Nobody is obligated to be a poster child, and that sucks you have to put up with it.

I created an account to comment here on the topicalness of this.

Given many of us on HN work in the field of online identity, this is supremely relevant topic.

As someone who has had acquaintances who transitioned, (one operation, one "asterixed" as another commenter described) and worked with a more than a few non-binary people, identity as experienced, and how it gets implemented by bureaucracies, companies, and the state, is an area where engineering runs up against basic philosophical problems.

One example was a mental health intake assessment that needed to handle patients who would present at different service providers as male or female separately. Given they may or may not provide govt ID that specified a gender, and different drugs and protocols for serving them would apply based on both their eligibility, history and the identity they were last treated under, providing identity to people with dynamic identities is requires non-trivial solutions, with life altering impacts.

Prior art from pre-digital culture for handling dynamic identities is a really big deal. Even as someone of a decidedly unsympathetic political stripe, one would be missing a lot of facts to believe what we now call non-binary gender identities are merely a modern thing.

The association of a changed identity with criminality is more a peculiarity of very recent mentalities than trans identities. I have worked on a variety state identity schemes and candidates for them, mainly steering them away from being used as a way to oppress people.

In non-health environments, the trans case was not a significant use case because we worked on the credentials, treating the legitimacy of identity as something for the customer to decide, but the trans identity use case would actually serve as a useful limit on how deterministic an identity credential or document is.

I get that there is a lot of political stuff around this topic, and talking about it is difficult because of the political consequences for wrongthink, but HN is probably one of the most relevant places to talk about the significance of dynamic identity.