I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
Some have explained it with a lack of trust between citizens and the country.
But without such digital id it is impossible to have such digital government services as we have here. The government services need to verify and autheticate the citizen, so they only access their own data and not someone who has the same name and birth date by accident.
I don't see how such a system gives the government more powers. It already has all the data on its citizens, but it is spread out, fragmented, stored with multiple conflicting versions, maybe some of it is stored in databases where no one cares about security, etc.
When the state is more likely to cause you problems than help you out, you want them to be bad at it. The corrupt cop going on a fishing expedition to try to bust you for something because you're dating his ex, who can't find anything because it's "spread out, fragmented, stored with multiple conflicting versions" -- that's what you want to happen.
It's also not just about the government. If you give everyone a government ID which is easy to use over the internet, private companies will then demand that you use it over the internet and use it as a tracking ID. Which is the evil to be inhibited.
The UK government has justified this with reducing the amount of illegal workers. To work legally currently you need an NI number, this is not an improvement on that system other than requiring everyone to have a phone (probably with safetynet checks to ensure it can't be running a custom rom).
I personally do not trust the government one little bit and am sure they'll find some way to abuse this, as they have just about everything else they do at this point. This possibly sounds far fetched, but why couldn't they ask for GPS permissions on the app then use it to quickly find out who was at a pro Palestine protest for example given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?
They have given us no reason to believe things will improve with it's introduction, and have given us plenty of reasons to believe it will be abused. It's almost perfect for that, "install our software on the device you have most places you go, or you can't earn a living anymore".
More than this, employers are already required to verify right to work when they employ someone, either by physically seeing a passport or by means of an existing government system which allows them to verify visa status with an online "share code". They can be fined if they don't.
There's zero reason to believe employers which currently ignore this requirement (and likely minimum wage etc as well) will suddenly start complying because there's a "digital ID" instead.
Currently enforcement is expensive, because in order to prove that somebody is/isn't allowed to work, you need to first identify them. Without any way of identifying workers, how could the government make the case that a company is employing people illegally? Generally crime incidence is higher when chances of getting caught are low, so as long as the government cannot practically enforce these kinds of laws, employers are more likely to continue breaking them.
The crackdown on immigrants is just an excuse. The real reason is different, the government is out of money and it doesn't believe most of the current welfare bill goes to people in genuine need. (Hence why the previous misadventures of a left-wing government involved 2 attempts at cutting welfare - first the winter bonus for pensioners, then a type disability payments).
The direct attempts at a crackdown failed, and the civil service keeps telling them it can't find any welfare fraud, (which looks fairly unlikely, given certain regional patterns), so they are trying to attack the problem indirectly - by synchronizing the identity numbers of different government record-keeping systems - HMRC, national insurance, the NHS, the land registry, council records.
Most pensioners don't need financial help. The fuel allowed was introduced by Gordon Brown when they were the poorest cohort in the country. Now they are they amount the most well off. Pensioners that need it still get it.
Strangely there was no fuss when universal child benefit was taken away in 2015 (or maybe later I forget). The media was full of stories about how rich people were getting £20 a week when they didn't need it.
Now apparently pensioners that have a larger income than most working families are desperate for the fuel allowance and they will be freezing to death without it. Its nonsense.
>probably with safetynet checks to ensure it can't be running a custom rom
And they can, forgive me for my rather vulgar language, fuck right off with this thinking. Problem is it will still go into place, because for most people giving up the right of being able to govern their own device that they paid for is not a problem for whatever reason. Neither will it be until it touches something that is important to them - that's when, hopefully, some more people will be able to see that we are rapidly spiralling downwards toward a complete techno-authoritarian dystopia.
>given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?
A protest group attacked a military base causing £millions of damage. They got censured, as a terrorist organisation.
"Protestors" decided they wanted to support that specific organisation, taking focus away from their message and chasing after something the government simply can't countenance: allowing protestors to ruin our defensive capabilities, at immense expense to the taxpayer, just to make some headlines.
If these people cared about Palestinians then they should have given up supporting the proscribed 'terrorists' and protested in a way that didn't require the government to crack down hard. Plenty of other non-proscribed protest groups are perfectly allowed.
Private corporation's already know everywhere you go, if you have a mobile phone, or use a debit/credit card, or drive a car. The government already know where you work and when, if you pay your taxes.
What Reform/Tories/right-wingers didn't want was any solution that would ease the problems they're using to try and rile the people into full culture wars. Labour are giving them what they [say they] want: making it harder for illegal immigrants, making it harder to claim benefits. But Farage isn't really there to solve a problem, here's there to create one as a means to weadle into power (presumably so he can refuse to do any useful work with that power, as he did in the EU) so he can fuck up the UK trying to be Trump 2 Fascist Boogaloo.
It's messed up that they wasted millions of pounds that should have been sent to israel instead. If they were really serious about their cause, they should have protested in a manner that is convenient for me and totally harmless
Terrorism is targeting civilians or civilian infrastrucure to further a political goal.
Terrorism have a bad rep, but it was used successfully in South africa to remove apartheid, with the French resistance and a lot of anti-colonization movement. Targeting fuel depots and the Crimea bridge can also be considered terrorism (and is, by the russian).
I personnally think we ought to distinguish terrorism which mostly target civilians from terrorism on which civilan death are side-effect, but the US state department calling terrorists people who only killed military targets during the Irak/Afghanistan war diluted the meaning of the word further. I'm trying to push back on that, because when the meaning of terrorism is diluted enough, it stop to be a good word to describe a phenomenon we ought to stop, and start to be a word used by politician to target what they don't like.
In glad you used scare quotes around the word "terrorists", suggesting you are as cynical about this absurd misuse of the term as the rest of us. That's the actual issue here. Yes, PA's acts of civil disobedience should be punished according to law, but classing an organisation as "terrorist", based on one (?) incident that appears to have spread literally zero terror, is appalling behaviour from a pitiful, authoritarian government.
Russia also have very good digital services. Now in one go government can send you conscription notification and immediately block your from leaving country as well as revoke driver license, block your banks and even phone numbers.
Also since all the data available about you in one place any malicious actor who can bribe someone with access can immediately get all your data: passport info and tax id, addresses, work history, all cars and all owned properties, everything.
Having centralized system with information about everything can very easily be used for oppression.
> Also since all the data available about you in one place
Note that having a 'Digital ID' and 'all the data available about you in one place' are two completely different things. You can have a electronic ID system and separated specialized systems. In fact I think Germany is going in this direction, also giving the citizens the ability to request deletion of all information held about them in a particular system.
The judicial system is the one who is supposed to prevent abuses of power like this. What you are proposing is essentially security through obscurity, if the data is fragmented all over the place on different institutions it is really hard to be exploited in the government, but still totally can be.
Confidential data can have better security checks and encryption layers so it is accessible only by the citizen itself or whoever the citizen grants access to (please don't bring up blockchain, it can be done without it). The technology exists.
Not quite right. This is defense in depth. The judicial system is supposed to prevent abuses like this, but just in case, you also limit the ability of the government to track you.
> Confidential data can have better security checks and encryption layers so it is accessible only by the citizen itself or whoever the citizen grants access to
The countries that these discussions are about (the UK and RU, with the subtext of the US) have not demonstrated that their legislators are trustworthy enough to implement digital ID in a privacy-preserving. Unless and until that happens, then discussion of it is off the table. When you advocate for a thing being implemented, you are implicitly advocating for its current real-world implementations.
> Not quite right. This is defense in depth. The judicial system is supposed to prevent abuses like this, but just in case, you also limit the ability of the government to track you.
My point was the government can still totally track you as an individual, the data is just fragmented all over the place. But if you are high profile the government can totally put some investigator to track down everything.
This kind of security benefits the general population against mass-scale crackdowns (like dodging conscription in Russia) of course, but it can still be weaponized against individuals (like journalists, dissidents, political opposition). Which are the main people who needs this kind of data-protection.
As if this wasn't possible before digital ID was introduced. The only difference was that you got a conscription notice after you tried to leave and realised that you can't.
I really doubt that. America's Congress seems to have very little difficulty in debanking people all across Europe, and obviously, they have no access to any European identity system. Canada infamously froze the bank accounts of anyone donating to anti-government protest movements and it's one of the nations without a comprehensive identification system.
KYC has already killed any financial privacy people may have had.
I agree with what you say, but I still think people should push back on this. It shouldn't be convenient for governments to abuse their citizens.
However, a bad actor (depends on how well funded/connected they are) would still have a harder time getting information.
As for the KYC thing, right now it's mostly to ensure you're not funding terrorist/criminal enterprises (at least it was the case for one of my previous companies). The data isn't just readily available to any political party who asks for it (I guess most companies will comply under certain conditions, but the legal friction is the point I think).
unless you are 100% card-less you can already get locked out of banks easily. Your digital ID already exists, it's just that you don't have a card with it yet.
As others stated: KYC killed private banking. Good.
Exceptionally good. Sometimes I even think it's worth it.
Need a specific statement or a document - here you have it in PDF in 2 minutes in an android app with somewhat decent usability.
The only saving grace for us is incompetence. Tyrannies breed incopmetence in goverments since competent people are able to ask troubluing questions. At least I hope so.
The only problem is that any scammer who can pay $100-200 bribe can reset your password without you there and immediately get all these PDFs, then mess up your whole life.
I'm somewhat indifferent to the concept of a Digital ID. The problem is that the UK government's reason for introducing it doesn't make sense - to 'solve' illegal workers, when the UK already has a (digital) system for proving right to work https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work/get-a-share-code-onli...
I'm somewhat indifferent to the concept of a Digital ID. The problem is that the UK government's reason for introducing it doesn't make sense - to 'solve' illegal workers, when the UK already has a (digital) system for proving right to work
I saw some British politicians discussing this on Sky last week, and I really don't see the point of the British digital ID.
They say having yet another new ID number will make things "easier." But didn't really say how. Brits already have ID numbers for lots of things. It wasn't spelled out how having yet another number will make things better.
My tech mind tells me that it's just going to save some DB admins from having to JOIN some columns. But a number is a number. Why yet another number?
And the whole thing about having a number will somehow stop people from working illegally seems like a red herring. I believe Brits already have to have a national insurance number in order to work. That hasn't stopped people from working illegally. They talking heads didn't explain what's so magical about this new number that will suddenly do things that the old number or numbers didn't.
/Not a Brit. Just bewildered by what appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
> They say having yet another new ID number will make things "easier." But didn't really say how. Brits already have ID numbers for lots of things.
They don't have a national ID system though. Having a lot of different ID systems that are IDing other things for other purposes doesn't address this.
> My tech mind tells me that it's just going to save some DB admins from having to JOIN some columns.
I don't know how this works in the UK but I do know a bit about how this works in other jurisdictions. The data in the current systems are there because there is a law that says what data is collected and for what purpose. You can't lawfully use it for a different purpose (there might be a loophole for public safety or whatever, but that would be an exception). Your organisation would break the law and the bosses could go to jail. But also, it was designed for one purpose and if you tried to use it for a different one, you would run into a lot of data quality issues.
Sky is a really right wing partisan channel though, ofc they are going to say negative things about the incumbent government or basically anything it does.
Not to say the idea is good or bad, but how people watch hyper-partisan media and draw any conclusions from it is beyond me.
> Sky is a really right wing partisan channel though, ofc they are going to say negative things about the incumbent government or basically anything it does
You are pretending as if Sky is like Fox News in the UK. It is more like a slightly right of centre network.
Sky didn't say anything. The two talking heads from two different political parties said things.
As an outsider, I have no idea if Sky News is "right wing" or not. I watch Sky and BBC because those are the two British services I can get where I am.
(And occasionally ITV, but it seems to be all potatoes, and no meat.)
I note that instead of addressing the topic of discussion, you deflect into another topic. Why is that?
Sure, but it’s not like there media outlets just select any old person to discuss any old topic. They can choose who they want to be the mouthpiece for a certain topic and make sure they get plenty of airtime to say whatever is required…
Legally they have to provide "Due Impartiality" on the TV network. So they normally invite several people so they can claim they have provided balance.
I actually don't like that they are legally required they do this as often it becomes a shouting match between two participates. I want to hear someone's argument in full.
As a Canadian-American living in Denmark, I've seen both sides of this. In short: trust and mistrust are _both_ self-reinforcing concepts.
To take an example - would I want the current US government to be better at compiling information across all its agencies / departments? Absolutely not. What it does with its current level of consolidation is authoritarian enough that I'm not moving back there any time soon. I hear similar sentiments from my Hungarian colleagues, who are quite familiar with competitive authoritarianism in their own country.
Of course, this mistrust becomes self-reinforcing. I don't trust the US government, so I want it to be bad at its job - but then it's bad at its job, so I see it as ineffective and bloated and continue to mistrust it.
IMHO the only way out of this spiral is the hard way: a system must do the hard work to show itself trustworthy, and it must do so _before_ people will entrust it with the information that would make the job of being trustworthy easier. As with human relationships, it takes a _lot_ more work to repair trust than it does to break it. Unlike with human relationships, you also have systemic factors: the system needs an unbroken series of good, principled leaders; it needs to visibly and credibly punish corruption, not turn a blind eye; it needs to de-escalate divisions, not inflame them; it needs various institutional safeguards to work properly, not chop away at them; it needs to allow meaningful dissent and criticism, not crack down on it; it needs to learn from expertise, not undermine it.
Most importantly: the system needs to learn from its failures, and adjust the rules and incentives of the system itself to prevent those failures from recurring. This is generational work.
> I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
It depends on the country and its relationship with the people. If the people trust that their government represents the people's interests, there is little push-back. In countries where citizens have reason to believe their government is hijacked by interests that do not have their best interests at heart, then every move is viewed with suspicion.
In this case people are tying Digital ID to CBDCs and social credit systems, which is a reasonable thing to do, given this is exactly how China uses them to enforce 15-minute cities with checkpoints between them. All citizens conversations are tracked, their movements are restricted as well [1], and their ability to purchase goods & services are tightly regulated based on their behavior via the social credit system. This is the world that people who are pushing back against this are trying to avoid.
Wow, crazy seeing the "15 minute city" conspiracy theory on HN! For those who haven't seen it, the idea of 15 minute cities is that a lot of people think it would be great to structure development of cities with the ideal of a person being able to access most of the services they want to (workplaces, schools, supermarkets, doctors) within 15 minutes (whether walking, cycling, using public transit etc.) of where they live. It's basically a target for how easily you should be able to access services without needing to travel far, and a push-back of massive suburbs zoned solely as single-family housing that force you to drive a long way to get to anything.
The more conspiratorial among us have baselessly decided the idea of "hey it would be great to build schools and things near where people live" must actually be a globalist plot to restrict people's movement to within 15 minutes of their home. It's wild!
If you are going to mock conspiracy theorists can you at least articulate the conspiracy theory correctly.
People are worried that it would be made difficult for you to travel outside 15 minute city via a combination of mandated digital payment system for all transactions that are tied to you identity and removal of personal vehicles (e.g. cars).
e.g. Person A is allowed by authorities to buy a train ticket, while Person B is not due to <arbitrary criteria>.
I've been told this has been done in China to stop people travelling to protests, but I don't actually know if that is true.
Do I think this is the intention behind 15 minute cities? No. I do however think that what they are describing is possible since I've had problems making transactions electronically for legal purchases because my transaction was flagged by the bank for being fraudulent.
Also in the UK the bank can refuse to give you your money.
I have also had a problem before with a transaction being inaccurately flagged as fraudulent. This could either be because an anti-fraud algorithm isn’t perfect 100% of the time, or it could be the result of a vast government conspiracy to limit my travel.
I have my doubts that China, which has many of the densest cities in the world, would get much mileage (pun intended) out of restricting travel to try to quell protests. They have tons of cities that each have millions of residents. If the CPC manages to piss off a significant fraction of the populace to the point where they’re interested in marching down the street demanding regime change, there will be enough of them in those cities that no amount of travel restrictions is going to matter.
Arguably much more important would be that I don’t think most people in China own any significant weapons, and we’ve seen decades ago how shy that government isn’t about just running people over with tanks until protests dissipate.
> I have also had a problem before with a transaction being inaccurately flagged as fraudulent. This could either be because an anti-fraud algorithm isn’t perfect 100% of the time, or it could be the result of a vast government conspiracy to limit my travel.
I never said it was part of a government conspiracy. What I am saying is that your ability to transact freely is infringed by opaque mechanisms.
If that is added with digital only payments which is tied to your gov id, it isn't difficult to imagine a scenario where your ability to transact freely be taken away to stop you from travelling for political reasons.
I admit you have a fair point here. I'm a political independent but started out left-wing. It's hard for me to accept the reality that a government that starts out well-meaning definitely can tilt toward totalitarianism, and that the lack of good chokepoints on the citizens (such as this hypothetical ability to control payments) may well be a key prevention mechanism. I think the left wing in the US likes to frame suspicion of those kinds of things as silly preparations for a future that won't happen, and the right frames roadblocks to government power as being in place to make that bad future harder to bring about.
> It's hard for me to accept the reality that a government that starts out well-meaning definitely can tilt toward totalitarianism, and that the lack of good chokepoints on the citizens (such as this hypothetical ability to control payments) may well be a key prevention mechanism
You are making the assumption that any politician or government is "well meaning" or started out as such. I am in the UK and I look at the politicians and the state apparatus with absolute contempt.
I suggest you listen to some of Dominic Cummings interviews about his experience with Whitehall (UK) during COVID. There was one situation that he described which really stood out to me. There was particular situation early in the pandemic where the NHS was going to run out of a key medical supplies in about 2 weeks and as a result thousands could die. These supplies were shipped from China and it took about 3/4 weeks (I forget the exact time frame).
For some reason it was written into law that they had to be shipped. He had the Prime Minister sign a legal waiver so they could be air-lifted, explained this to key officials in Whitehall. Everyone agreed what needed to be done and then nothing happened for 3 days. These people had to be threatened with losing their jobs and their pensions otherwise they wouldn't do their job, they fully understood the consequences of not doing the job (thousands of people might die) and still did nothing. It is an apathy of evil.
This behaviour is commonplace in ossified organisations unfortunately and I wasn't surprised one iota when I heard this.
As for mechanisms that reduce state power as prevent totalitarianism. No one thing will prevent it. It would be a combination of things.
It is similar to how running Linux (or any alternative OS) won't by itself stop the strangle hold of large tech players over most of the tech/online space. It will at least help you reduce your dependence on these large companies. Combine that with self hosting and/or using alternatives at least you can be somewhat free from the worst of it.
> I think the left wing in the US likes to frame suspicion of those kinds of things as silly preparations for a future that won't happen, and the right frames roadblocks to government power as being in place to make that bad future harder to bring about.
Silly partisan politics is going to have both sides pretending that the other side doesn't have any merit in their positions. I would just ignore the noise and actually read the facts about things and draw your own conclusions.
I believe that most of the politics you see is really theatre. It keeps people squabbling over things that are ultimately unimportant.
It’s not a social credit system because it doesn’t weight your social involvement in the society (political party, school credentials, race) but rather payment history, amount of debt, types of credit
Not at all. It is simply a score based on your ability to manage credit, it is scored differently based on the company making the assessment.
In reality that means "have you paid off what you owe in the manner that was agreed" and does the person have any red flags e.g. County Court Judgements against their name or residence.
There are people I know that manage it properly and those that don't. It has nothing to do with wealth or class.
It doesn’t inherently have to do with wealth and class, however, all of these things are so tightly correlated that it loses barely any fidelity and just saves you a little bit of time to assume that someone with an 815 credit score is law-abiding, upper-middle or high social class, and has a medium to high net worth, and that somebody with a 550 credit score is at least one of the following: poor, criminal history, and a low social class.
None of this should be that surprising: it’s hard to make all of your debt payment payments on time if you’re either broke or in jail.
No having a high credit score has nothing do with your wealth or social class. I have worked in this industry briefly. It looks at your ability to manage credit, and whether you have any flags.
e.g. I had a 995 credit score on Experian back in the late 2000s. The highest was 999. I earned £18,000 at the time, and was in my mid-20s and didn't really own anything at the time. I did have a credit card at the time where I made the payments, and I lived at a household which had no debt, and I was on the electoral roll.
That is why when you are making larger purchases they do a "means test" e.g. see if you earn enough to pay a mortgage.
Your case is a great example of why credit scores are not reliable indicators. You were living on the ropes then. One job loss and you probably have very little saved and will be forced to incur debt and and start defaulting on payments potentially. You were very much the risky bet. And yet, you were able to game the system to look like a reliable bet.
Gaming the system like you were able to do in order to improve your credit score is very much correlated to financial literacy which is correlated to socioeconomic class which is correlated to race. This is how we arrive at credit scores being race and class indicators, but not bound by laws that prohibit using race and class as indicators.
Your comment is a great example of "If you assume, it makes an ass out of u and me".
Everything about this reply is completely incorrect.
> Your case is a great example of why credit scores are not reliable indicators. You were living on the ropes then. One job loss and you probably have very little saved and will be forced to incur debt and and start defaulting on payments potentially. You were very much the risky bet. And yet, you were able to game the system to look like a reliable bet.
So you made a bunch of assumptions about my personal circumstances. Let me correct you:
- I didn't "Game the system". I had absolutely no idea at the time such a thing as a credit score existed. I cannot game a system when I have no idea that it exists. The only reason I checked is that other people at work were checking theirs and I did so sheerly out of curiosity. Many years later I happened to work a contract where they wrote software that did the credit checks.
- I was not "living on the ropes". I lived within my means.
- I had 2-3 months of savings. My strategy for saving this money was to save it on payday. So I forgot I had the money and couldn't spend it. I do exactly the same thing now.
- The debt I had on my credit card was paid off in full monthly. I only used it for online purchases (many online sites didn't take debit cards still).
> Gaming the system like you were able to do in order to improve your credit score is very much correlated to financial literacy which is correlated to socioeconomic class which is correlated to race.
Again I did not game the system. I was completely financially illiterate at the time. My only financial literacy, I had at time was that I shouldn't spend all my money after payday and I shouldn't spend more money than I had. I found that out in the first month of living on my own. My family actually earn a lot less than I do now.
None of this has anything to do with race. From reading your comments replying to me and your posting history, I am pretty sure you are from the US. You are applying your US centric view of the world onto the UK. The UK is not the US.
> This is how we arrive at credit scores being race and class indicators, but not bound by laws that prohibit using race and class as indicators.
What you are trying to do is to erroneously shoehorn in your brand of US politics into a discussion about the UK. As a result of this you have got everything about my personal circumstances (at the time) and the circumstances of family and wider community completely incorrect, in an attempt to score some political points (it obvious btw from the language you are using).
I suggest in future you shouldn't make assumptions.
Because there is already a barrier to prevent that. Defaulting on the home loan or not paying rent and facing eviction. Having a barrier based on past behavior is stupid. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Funny how that works for investment banks to cover their ass but they can't see how it might also apply to individuals.
I realize that you responded to a specific statement, not necessarily the entire context of the thread. However:
Saying that a person’s credit score is entirely due to their own financial decisions is incorrect because it’s overly simplistic, that’s true, although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story). It can also depend on circumstances specific to the person but not directly related to their own actions (e.g. their credit provider revises credit limits across the board due to external factors, so their credit utilization changes too, without them having used any more or less of it).
In addition, and what you’re alluding to, is that these models are continuously revised. A set of behaviors and circumstances that lead to a higher score in one economic environment may not do the same in another.
Credit scores as implemented in for instance the US are not a direct reflection of a person’s moral character or intended as a reward for good behavior. They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits. This also enables credit providers to give out more credit overall, based on less biased criteria (not unbiased, because models are never perfect and financial circumstances can be proxies for other attributes).
One can feel however one wants about whether this system is good or not. But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.
> although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story).
This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.
Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.
> They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits.
This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.
> But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.
We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”
> This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.
It maybe doesn’t adress the point you’re interested in, but it doesn’t miss the point I was making, that the goals and mechanisms revolves around how well a person manages credit. For the credit provider everything else is secondary or irrelevant, including whether it’s because you’ve made poor decisions or external factors have screwed you over.
> Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.
This is probably the crux of why we’re not on the same page, because I don’t understand what this means. I’m genuinely asking, what do you mean when you say that they treated it as a social credit score marker? What business did you have with them (or they with you) that didn’t involve whether or not to extend credit? What does the term “social credit score marker” mean to you?
> This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.
I don’t see how you explain that it’s a fallacy, and I don’t think it is, but I concede that it’s a confusing word choice - I should probably have just omitted the word “uncaring”. My point was once again that their sole goal is determining the risk of extending a person credit - whether that would be a nice or moral thing to do or not doesn’t factor into it.
> We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”
I assume here that you mean that people’s financial status, including their access to credit, determines a lot of aspects of their lives, too (correct me if I’m wrong). I don’t think any reasonable person disagrees with that. I do however think that you underestimate how constraining it can be when additional variables are factored in to more directly control what you are and aren’t allowed to do, and how.
UK credit score system don't even have "nationality" in it so not discriminating non-citizens that much. Neither it hold any ID card or passport numbers.
Yeah there is electoral roll, but you can still access credit without being on it and afaik all residents of scotland are on it since even non citizens can vote in local election.
And unlike US there not even a "score" number since lenders only get records but not some magical number. Whatever credit agencies sell you as credit score is just random number they come up with and it's not being used by lenders btw.
Seems like a red-herring. Does a government need a digital ID to do that? Many do that with the "free market" of publicly-tradable information + pre-existing government IDs already used for certain things. I don't know for sure how much the UK government is purchasing all that, but there's a lot of cameras and tech tracking in the country already, like those of us across the pond also are watched with.
It won't reverse surveillance states but fraud is also a huge problem that deserves addressing.
Yes, governments do need a centralized common identity if they intend to build something like a social credit system. Those without adequate experience dealing with the US system, for instance, may assume that the government already has your info and thus such a system is redundant. However, this is simply not the case. US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification. Talk to some people in the IRS or Social Security and you’ll quickly get a sense of how many problems this can create! Maybe it’s improved since I last talked to people about it, but I doubt it.
A central ID enforced on all systems by statute would significantly reduce the barrier to creating “airtight” oppressive systems. While the inefficiencies in the US system have a cost, certainly preventing the implementation of more efficient social benefit programs, they also provide a barrier against more efficient social repression. Given the political animosity present in the country right now, it’s probably good that we don’t have the ability to create a turnkey totalitarian system. Things are bad enough as is!
More generally, in nations where the population feels suspicion towards their politicians and bureaucrats, the people may prefer to leave inefficiencies baked into the system in order to hamper potential oppression. Those social tensions and trust deficits should be resolved before proceeding with any ambitious central ID schemes.
US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier).
This is a feature, not a bug.
Even though we're only at the very beginning of the various U.S. systems being merged, we're already seeing it being abused.
(One example: States using license plate reader data to prosecute women for getting abortions in other jurisdictions.)
Honestly with things like abortion, where there are sincerely held beliefs with good points on both sides of it, I think it would be less work for literally everyone to truly leave it to the states and everybody just moves to the nearest or most convenient state that aligns with their values. I’m so sick of this one issue being a perennial divisive force. Both sides have a point. Go live wherever you agree with the policies. And if the blue states want to operate abortion clinics for runaway teens from red states that’s fine, then they can also build dorms for them and pay for them to stay there. Red states can do the opposite and build state-sponsored birthing centers and pay for childcare for the runaway teens from blue states whose parents want to force them to terminate.
Please read comments in full before replying to them:
> US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification.
Please understand that supposedly poor data quality is not a defence against an authoritarian country wanting to implement a social credit system.
Some national ID system won't make such ambitions significantly easier, but lack of such a system causes exactly the issues you quoted.
So is this hypothetical social credit system in the hands of an incompetent government worth it all? Over identity theft and the multi-billion industry around it?
And yet authoritarian countries without such central ID have historically had to use other less targeted methods of oppression, which creates pushback and dissent within the population, leading to either the downfall of the government or intensive reforms. The threat of a “clean” system of oppression is that it will only catch actual dissidents, without sweeping in innocents. This could freeze out any chance of effective opposition.
The most effective 20th century totalitarian states, such as the East German DDR, issued ID numbers to its citizens, along with ID cards that citizens were required to carry at all times. This greatly helped the security services coordinate the oppression of suspected radicals, but without modern computer systems it relied too heavily on human efforts. It eventually faced its limits against rising dissent and it could not prevent the downfall of the government. A computerized Stasi would be much more terrifying.
One can look around the US today to see why this lack of ID may be a good thing. Immigration officials are facing serious roadblocks in rounding up and processing suspected undocumented immigrants, and mistakes in this process are creating widespread pushback. Protestors who take steps to mask their identity are not easily identified, apprehended, and prosecuted, which has led the administration to overreach in their reaction to dissent. And the lack of a unified system of oppression means that even targets of the state can often find ways to continue living in between the cracks, and they are not totally frozen out. In many ways it’s not a great system, certainly far from perfect, but the many flaws serve an important purpose in the face of systemic oppression. Inefficiency is an escape hatch.
If you live in a high trust society, you may not get it. The mutual animosity in the US is such that we have government officials talking about “national divorce” and otherwise average people joking about political murder. I know the UK is not quite as bad off, but I understand that it is quickly moving in that direction. That’s no time to introduce new potential mechanisms of oppression.
> One can look around the US today to see why this lack of ID may be a good thing.
You have an identity though. You use other things as an ID in the end. Often shoehorned into fulfilling that task and mostly very cumbersome.
That's why it can be stolen, that's why "identity theft" is a multi-billion dollar thing. Thats why you keep your SSNs and I guess also CC#s rather tightly guarded.
> Protestors who take steps to mask their identity are not easily identified, apprehended, and prosecuted, which has led the administration to overreach in their reaction to dissent.
There's nothing about an electronic ID that would make this different from now. It makes no practical difference for oppression. If you don't have an SSN then other things about you are unique enough for identifying you. I'd say that's why it's even vaguely tolerated anyways.
> Inefficiency is an escape hatch.
I rather think it lulls you into a false sense of safety. Inefficiency in existing "numbering systems" can be overcome with resources. You truly do not lack an ID system, a number, computerization nor identity that could protect you.
A lack of one number is not really protection against any of that.
> You have an identity though. You use other things as an ID in the end. Often shoehorned into fulfilling that task and mostly very cumbersome.
My exact point, glad we agree. Very cumbersome indeed, and not centralized enough to use for turnkey totalitarianism. (Slow, plodding, inefficient totalitarianism, sure. But see my above post for why that isn’t as much of an existential threat.)
> There's nothing about an electronic ID that would make this different from now. It makes no practical difference for oppression. If you don't have an SSN then other things about you are unique enough for identifying you. I'd say that's why it's even vaguely tolerated anyways.
False. Electronic ID provides the means to tie together multiple systems that must currently be matched manually, with frequent false positives/negatives. It creates the means to quickly build a system that could “switch off” a person’s ability to function in society, and improves the ability of security services to pool data about individuals from disparate sources with a high level of confidence.
Nothing prevents oppression of individuals today, true. It’s a question of scale and accuracy. What we need to defend against is a system where oppression can be quickly, efficiently, and accurately targeted towards large groups. That’s the essence of turnkey totalitarianism. It can’t be built without a centralized ID system that’s applied consistently across other key systems. Current systems do not do this.
Myths about the US system:
* Every citizen has an SSN
* Every citizen uses the same name when dealing with different agencies and private businesses
* A person’s SSN always remains the same
* Citizens don’t register different addresses when dealing with different agencies and private businesses
* Government agencies use SSN as a primary key
* Agencies and businesses have a centralized, highly accurate way to determine who is deceased
* All citizens have a REAL ID license/ID
* All citizens have a license/ID
I hope this gives you a sense of how the US approaches ID. It’s extremely messy. Yes this enables things like identity fraud, guarding against this is part of the cost of our safeguards against totalitarianism. A price I’m willing to pay, given the behavior of our political establishment and the recent attitude of my fellow citizens.
> Electronic ID provides the means to tie together multiple systems that must currently be matched manually, with frequent false positives/negatives.
I don't think a totalitarian government cares much about false positives though.
> It creates the means to quickly build a system that could “switch off” a person’s ability to function in society, and improves the ability of security services to pool data about individuals from disparate sources with a high level of confidence.
I also don't think that bunch of different places to turn off someone's ability to participate in a society is a meaningful difference in practice. Even if it takes slightly longer or has false positives like you describe, it still achieves the totalitarian goal.
> A price I’m willing to pay, given the behavior of our political establishment and the recent attitude of my fellow citizens.
I unfortunately struggle to see the results of this sacrifice to be honest.
This reply tells me you haven’t read or understood my post above. Historically, inefficient totalitarianism is self-defeating, as its oppressive acts create constant friction and sweep up innocent bystanders, creating resentment among the population. This eventually builds to an explosive release.
Technologically modernized totalitarianism may be able to implement large-scale oppressive policies without affecting most of the population. In fact the average person may see a net benefit! This would create a more stable society despite the significantly lower level of freedom and self-determination. We may be witnessing the development of this sort of system in China, for example. The average person benefits, but a segment of the population faces brutal oppression with no recourse and must simply submit. (Contrast with the US, where people who face repression can sometimes start over by going dark and moving across the country.)
I read it and I think I understood it. But I disagree on the premise. I don't find that inefficiency is needed, protective or preventative.
I find it more likely that a totalitarian system that doesn't tolerate wrong-think will inherently start accumulating inefficiencies among other things. Which can then end up with the collapse of such a regime.
Building a technologically modernized authoritarian state might increase stability for a while, but not thinking is simply not competitive long-term. Unless you achieve total world domination, I guess.
Then I suppose I’m just less willing to risk tyranny through removing potential barriers. The best protection against a massive, complex system being wielded by evildoers is to never build the system properly in the first place.
While they may be able to gain power initially, would-be totalitarians will likely be fighting off multiple threats while they consolidate power. The more they have to manage and spend, the less likely they will be to succeed at their aims. You could argue that the DOGE debacle is the most recent and obvious example of this. All indications are that the project failed, and it occupied quite a lot of energy and effort during the critical transitional period of the administration.
> Yes, governments do need a centralized common identity if they intend to build something like a social credit system. Those without adequate experience dealing with the US system, for instance, may assume that the government already has your info and thus such a system is redundant. However, this is simply not the case. US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification. Talk to some people in the IRS or Social Security and you’ll quickly get a sense of how many problems this can create! Maybe it’s improved since I last talked to people about it, but I doubt it.
IMO this is another non-sequitor.
Let's say you had a digital ID in the form of a smart card for your SSN with a USB connection that was required to be plugged in when you auth'd to a government website to file your taxes. No new number would be required for a digital ID card in the US. Tax return fraud to get people's refund sent to someone else, though? Probably down! Does everyone have an SSN? Who cares, let's improve things for the vast-majority case where we have an extremely insecure little piece of paper.
That smart card doesn't magically reconcile and rationalize the sprawling hodgepodge of government systems.
Or, let's go the other way: not having a digital ID card does not prevent the government from rationalizing and tying all those systems together.
You might look back to the recent past when the executive branch sending employees to all those disparate agencies to grab that data and make changes to those systems! They didn't need a new digital ID to do that, and they wouldn't need a new digital ID to improve the use of SSN-as-PK-for-cross-system-joins.
Being more rigorous about tracking the existing numbers already assigned to you does not require smarter, cryptographically-sound, identification tokens. And those tokens do not require the government improve their processes for connecting things *after the "give us your SSN for identification" of their various separate web-based services (or the non-government entities that also use those SSNs) that people love to abuse for fraud.
Nor does any of this make it easier or harder for the government to take "absence of evidence of identity or citizenship" as "evidence of absence of identity or citizenship" - if you fit the non-citizen profile, the burden's already on you to prove it, and what makes you so sure that the courts wouldn't happily let this or a future administration expand the boundaries for "we picked you up because we were suspicious, now YOU have to prove who you are if you ever want to get out" regardless of if a digital ID card exists?
In the US we use a short number written on a paper card - social security numbers. It's a huge source of compromised security on every level from government services to corporate to personal data security.
Problem with a digital ID is that I don't want to use it beyond government service. But now there is discussion that people need to identify themselves for any and all online services.
If an ID is proliferated the legislative change to force ID checks is minimal. If it weren't just Estonia and government ID would be more widely spread, it would take less than 24h for the EU to enforce borders online.
I’d point out that the privilege to break the law simply “because online” is a pretty new thing. People in 1980 couldn’t automatically conduct transactions that were illegal, and access materials, their government deemed illegal, etc. If a book was banned in your country, it was likely just not available for you.
I really think people need to stop believing that the Internet solves all the problems of sovereign states doing anti-freedom things. That’s a part of life, and enabling people to evade laws, which may indeed be democratically voted upon, is not an automatic virtue. I don’t even think laws get changed because of this type of evasion, it just makes citizens more complacent about the laws that get passed because they know they can evade them anyway, but also it means most everyone is technically a criminal. Does anybody think people in those states that outlawed Internet porn stopped consuming it? But how many people are doing anything to change those laws? I don’t think very many. They’re just using a VPN. So the problem of oppressive laws isn’t being solved this way.
Just like Britons can’t imagine Estonia, I know you can’t imagine Britain.
In the UK there’s a bunch of government and company databases, and coalescing them isn’t just hard, in some cases it’s not even possible.
You can ask a company for specific details on a person, and they can make a “reasonable effort” to get the data. But if they mishandle the request (maybe your name has accents?) then the government gets no information.
The easier it gets, the easier it can be for them to excercise power over you, and right now there’s sufficient reason to be worried about that. The current government is liberally using the fascistic powers that the previous government created.
Nevada's DMV is a great example what happens without eID. Agencies that have a better idea about people's identity have been forced to do things like background checks and fingerprinting. Your data eggs in one basket, or a few.
If you attack the DMV in a country that has working eID it will only affect the DMV. Maybe you can't sign up for a driving exam or order new plates. That's it. It won't affect the police in cases that don't concern the DMV (like insurance) and vice versa. Sure if you attack everything at once everything will be affected, that's always an option, eID or not.
Fundamentally a digital ID does not mean a single "basket", just that wherever those "eggs" are that you know it's one single "chicken". That "chicken" can also have multiple ways of identifying themselves (including offline methods). That's how it is in countries that have a working eID implemented.
Good thing no one asked us about the digital identity when they implemented it.
It makes a difference as much as electronic money does. So instead of having to physically be able to pay someone we can transfer it, pay by debit card and lots of other ways now.
With digital identity we get the same - we can do paperwork remotely and securely.
Well people in Germany are also slow to get away with physical money and they are miles behind in digital services, so... some still enjoy the snail speed of everything (or not).
Meh, instead of days of paperworks, we can sell a car remotely (paperwork-wise). I tick some checkbox in my phone, the buyer ticks and off he goes - he has X number of days to acquire new technical passport for car and that's it. Also can be mailed if he wishes so.
Governments change. Any group in society has the potential to become marginalized, and if all services are funneled through a single system it becomes very easy to selectively switch off access.
> I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
Imagine if you were a large country, say 10x to 100x larger. Your government would be equally more resourced and probably have more hands controlling more parts of your business and lives. This is where digital id becomes a scarier prospect. This is where opportunity and ability finally collude.
Imagine a Russia-friendly party getting elected. Doesn't have to be overtly pro-russian. Can be someone very nationalist like Marine Le Pen in France. Or socialist like Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany. Just someone with financially dependent on Russia, or simply owing them favour.
Now imagine them accidentally leaving some loophole in the system, such that Russians get read or maybe even write access to data.
If they get elected they can fuck everyone over the exact same way.
The fact that there's something akin to a unique identifier or that it has a corresponding certificate or some means for authentication will and does not stop any malicious government. Never has, has it?
I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
Some have explained it with a lack of trust between citizens and the country.
But without such digital id it is impossible to have such digital government services as we have here. The government services need to verify and autheticate the citizen, so they only access their own data and not someone who has the same name and birth date by accident.
I don't see how such a system gives the government more powers. It already has all the data on its citizens, but it is spread out, fragmented, stored with multiple conflicting versions, maybe some of it is stored in databases where no one cares about security, etc.