This is the actual missing key bit. The problem that Google is trying to solve here is not actually a hardware / computational problem, it's a Real Identity problem. Hardware / TPMs are a poor proxy for solving that problem.
There's drastically less eWaste and impact on software freedom if you seek attestation from a national ID provider than if you seek attestation from one of a handful of personal electronics OEMs. National ID providers can offer to sign not only Real Identity attestations, but also anonymized attestations to protect citizen privacy. A web operator can decide whether to allow for attestations from only their own national ID provider, foreign national ID providers, private ID providers, or none at all if they just have a read-only site and don't really care.
The truth is that government inaction is forcing Big Tech down the road of violating user privacy and freedoms to solve Big Tech's problems. But getting the government to offer a flat Identity Provider playing field would solve these problems in a way that doesn't require such violation.
For example you could have the website never knowing your actual ID but simply passing an encrypted string to the national server, which would return a 200 response if the document is valid. You could also have additional requests like "is the user 18+".
The website will just know the request is coming from something which has a valid ID available. The state will also not know which pages you browsed, only the domain of the request, just like with HTTPs your ISP does not know exactly the pages you browse but just the websites themselves.
And before someone talks about the state knowing your browser history: they already can by calling up your ISP, and they would get a lot more information than this mechanism would provide.
Being a Russian passport holder who lives abroad for years, I don't want to be in touch with my gov in any way possible, and moreover depend on it.
That's actually the case for millions of people from different countries with dictatorships, do you propose just to discriminate everyone outside of 20-30 countries with more or less democratic systems ? Those countries don't care about "citizen privacy".
Apart from that, we all see the bill in the UK which is as much a disaster to human freedoms as Russian and Chinese laws, for example. So even being a citizen of a more modern country is not a guarantee.
People don't always live in their country of citizenship, they don't always live in one place (see digital nomads) and have a residence, they don't always trust their government and they should not be discriminated on internet usage because of that. That makes a person more of a government property rather than a human being.
A) used as political chaff for jockeying by power hungry politicians as distraction fodder or FUD material
B) centralized by the intelligence community of your country, or an allied country with an agreement that they'll do the work for your government that your government can't.
There are things that simply should not, nay, must not be made.
The Single Identification Number is one. We have all the tools to do it today. The only thing keeping it from happening is refusal to implement at the grassroots level.
Ah, ha!
The PR spin necessary to kill this in the US would be to connect it national ID. I hadn’t thought of that.
A narrative about national ID with some vague “mark of the beast” insinuation thrown in and suddenly a large political faction who otherwise would care about this would be opposed. I like it.
I think a political strategy of getting rural school districts + 20 State governments to go on record saying they will not purchase or use computers that have Google WEI could be very effective.
If any of that trust is broken my privacy is at risk.
> And before someone talks about the state knowing your browser history: they already can by calling up your ISP, and they would get a lot more information than this mechanism would provide.
That depends on how you browse the internet today, and how the ISP tracks it. Simply using a different DNS service goes a long way, and using a VPN or the tor network may not be totally fool proof but should get around the basic drag nets am ISP is likely to use.
It can replace your physical ID but it also has other useful features.
The most useful one is the ability to generate Identity Proofs that contain only the minimum required information to prove your identity.
They even have an expiration date, a named recever and a motive.
Of course the receiver can verify their legitimacy in the app.
No more sending copies of your ID !
I also think one of the features is proof of majority without revealing your identity. Probably made for adult websites because a ruling was made a while ago that they would have to enforce age restrictions better.
Being nobody's resident doesn't mean that you're not a human.
And anyway, there are a lot of people inside Russia, China, Iran, etc. And instead of helping them to use services with better privacy and consume uncensored views from outside id based system will give an impressive way to censor internet usage by government attesters. Have wrong views - say goodbye to the internet.
The ISP, with SNI implemented, would only be able to tell the state that "a device connected through this physical location accessed a server through Cloudflare".
My ISP will tell them I spend most of my time connected to Mullvad VPN, and Mullvad will tell them they don't know anything about what any particular IP address was doing.
Having to give identity attestations either directly or proxied by a government server would make such anonymous browsing much more difficult, if not impossible.
> to optimize their taxes
But in most of the states that have been pushing such laws that is very much not the case. The deliberately pick forms of ID that are less prevalent among poor and minority voters and that for many are expensive to obtain. In several they have also taken measures to make it even more difficult for those people to obtain ID.
For example if they require an ID that you get from the state's department of motor vehicles (DMV) they (in the name of budget cuts) close many DMV offices, and in the ones that remain open the cut back on the hours during which they will issue licenses to a few hours on weekdays. The closures mostly hit in poor and minority districts.
Yes, some of those laws do make some forms of acceptable ID free, but only in the sense that there is no fee to obtain that ID. Obtaining the documents necessary to obtain the ID will still have fees.
Real identity doesn't necessarily mean passport. It can mean, for example, a visa issued by your host government; being a valid visa holder therefore grants you a valid digital identity issued by that country.
> People don't always live in their country of citizenship, they don't always live in one place (see digital nomads) and have a residence, they don't always trust their government and they should not be discriminated on internet usage because of that. That makes a person more of a government property rather than a human being.
Then let's get rid of passports. Sounds like the deeper issue, no? Wouldn't you agree that freedom of movement and immigration is a higher and more important freedom than freedom of internet access?
This is the world we live in. Immigration concerns exist. Government-issued identity is real. It just hasn't caught up to the 21st century.
1. 18+website tells the browser age verification is needed, gives a random token
2. Browser signs a verification request with the local ID card (or a key temporality allowed to do so), forwards it to government server
3. Government server sees the request with random token, signs both, answer the browser
4. Browser forwards signed attestation to 18+website.
The government server only sees the random token. The website only has the attestation. There are other things that can be nitpicked against, but not this. For instance, can we require local ID cards? What about foreign visitors? Possibly an attestation from their passport? And of course, browsers sit in the middle and see everything.
However, this could be a useful mechanism to have. For age verification, nationality check, or even identity check on official websites. And if we have this, it's bound to be abused in some ways (Facebook could require an ID check).
This is just an enormous nope for me. No better than this WEI stuff.
> The truth is that government inaction is forcing Big Tech down the road of violating user privacy and freedoms to solve Big Tech's problems.
Whether is governmental or private action, how is it right or good that everyone has to suffer just because big tech has business model problems?
You can stay in UAE for half a year, start being their resident with 0% tax and then moving around stayng less than 183 days anywhere. It's of course better to be connected to UAE or other low tax jurisdiction in case of "personal connection" taxes requirements. Nothing unethical, illegal or bad in that. As far as it's perfectly legal in lots of countries, that's optimizing and not dodging or avoiding.
If you are staying UAE resident this way, you probably will have some troubles receiving gov services, because you don't live there in fact most of the time (and you are still just a tax resident and not always resident in terms of long-term living permit).
Anyway, placing a person to be "managed" by some government is a really dystopian concept.
There is basically no reason for, for example, African young person to be more restricted in his freedom of movement than European one, but we are where we are.
Though I believe while we have outdated and unfair system of belonging to some borders, it's better not to make it even worse by adding new layers of dependency on these IDs.
Wouldn't be better to add more opportunities equality instead of hardening it?
You claim to believe it's not and offer no counter point outside of you feel it in your gut and a desire to deflect and attack OP for making the point by calling the poster prejudice.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jul/11/eric-holde...
https://www.aclu.org/documents/oppose-voter-id-legislation-f...
https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2018/Minority_Voting_Access...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...
https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/4/7157037/us-voter-id-req...
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/644648955/for-older-voters-ge...
https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-...
https://www.theregreview.org/2019/01/08/shapiro-moran-burden...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/heres-h...
https://scholars.org/contribution/high-cost-free-photo-voter...
https://now.tufts.edu/2018/01/23/proving-voter-id-laws-discr...
No, there isn't. It's basically an OAuth login flow. The spec is publicly documented, anyone can register applications and check if the government is responding as desired, both by correctly requesting auth for the correct scopes in the government-hosted auth page, and by checking that the data returned from the gov matches what the spec promises.
I couldn't agree more, but you gotta apply the right leverage to the right problem, put the round pegs in the round holes and the square pegs in the square holes. Real digital identity does for the digital economy what credit cards did for the retail economy: dramatically reduce the cost of friction, and therefore dramatically expand, how much activity there will be. It is this reduction in friction which opens additional opportunities even to people with identities issued by less-favored governments. Separately, we can and should push to make qualified immigration simpler, faster, and for more applicants.
I am a bit opinionated about that, because I already saw lots of that in Russia with all these fancy "security" and "convenient" digital tools and how it ended.
Digital Id should be solved by some kind of WebOfTrust, private DIDs and somehow distributed reputation systems, not by centralized government databases. It's a straight way to tyranny.
Th main idea as that I strongly disagree that a person must have an ID outside of some questionable country and that's more of an example. I personally traveled just because I wanted to travel a lot, it was before the war and stuff, but as I know currently lots of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians are changing countries to find the best for them. When you don't have home anymore, there is no reason to settle to the first place you visited.
BTW, 3 flights per year with 2-3 bags will cost you around 3k USD, you will probably overpay around 300-400 USD per month staying in Airbnb in low-cost of living countries like Thailand, so in fact the whole cost of moving will be around 7-10k USD per year. If you earn IT remote salary, you will probably save a lot.
Though you'll need a tax consultant to avoid breaking any tax law accidentally, but that's not so expensive outside of the EU and the US.
It's also worth considering where this stuff comes from instead of ascribing anything the other team says to superstitious fools and their invisible sky man.
Branding people like cattle wasn't invented in modernity. It's infamous Nazi behavior, and the Nazis weren't the first to do it either. It's so old that people centuries ago saw how bad it turns out and put a warning against it in their ancient book.
You don't have to believe in the devil to believe that history repeats and learn a lesson from the people who came before.
Google is loving this, I bet.
I didn’t say any of that. You have no idea what I believe beyond that I don’t buy into the “mark of the beast”. Anything else you read into my comment is something you read in.
That you went straight to comparing my comment to Nazism seems a bit uncharitable.
Conversely, that system is not secure if the site conspires with the government, because the government could record the signature (or the token) and then compare it to the one the site has to violate the anonymity of a legitimate user. There are forms of encryption that prevent this (the user does a cryptographic operation on their own device that munges the data so the site can still verify the signature but can't tell which one it was), but now you need the government to implement that system -- and update it if any vulnerability is found -- and do a coordinated update of all the sites in the world with the new protocol that patches whatever vulnerability is found -- and do this rapidly and competently because in the meantime the system would have to be taken offline to avoid it being actively exploited.
Do Not Attempt. Failure inevitable.
I'm not comparing your comment to Nazism, I'm comparing universal identity systems to Nazi behavior, because that's what they are. Their primary use, the major thing they do that decentralized credentials systems don't, is to facilitate mass surveillance and authoritarianism.
My point is that this has been understood for a long time, and the people who say "mark of the beast" have a legitimacy to their concern that has been demonstrated throughout history, regardless of whether or not you believe the fine details of the allegory.
Just the domain is still a pretty major information leak.
> And before someone talks about the state knowing your browser history: they already can by calling up your ISP, and they would get a lot more information than this mechanism would provide.
Yeah, but they have to ask. This creates a system that requires preemptively sending them that information.
I took your particular reply as accusing me of being critical of religiosity-- specifically "...ascribing anything the other team says to superstitious fools and their invisible sky man."
I took your statement about "branding people" as a statement on this perceived accusation that I was speaking unfavorably about religiosity.
Your clarification that your were comparing universal identification to Nazism makes me read your comment in a different light.
The reason why it needs to be managed by the government is because legal contracts are ultimately enforced by government courts. Many things that, today, rely upon pen-and-paper signature (and Docusign-style electronic variants, which are just digital facades to the pen-and-paper reality), to get them enforced, require submitting more mountains of paperwork and physical appearances etc. We can't get out from behind that paper legacy, really start to explore contracts that can be disputed and enforced with simple online forms and no in-person appearances (everything from employment, to real estate / housing, to credit...) until the courts have a trustworthy to say, for this digital identity that signed that agreement, we know that it really was such-and-such a real person.
> It's a straight way to tyranny.
You'll disagree, but I would argue that it isn't more powerful tools that make government tyrannical, but a lack of education, poor culture, and a lack of checks-and-balances on government power. The government is supposed to have a monopoly on various parts of life, first and foremost a monopoly on violence (police, courts, and justice). "Democratic" but weak governments (consider e.g. Mexico, in the context of the drug wars) are ineffective at securing the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; America has a history of strong governmental institutions that protect these rights. "Technology is neither good, nor evil, nor neutral, it simply is," and indeed, improving governmental strength by pushing past technical barriers is simply an orthogonal concern (IMO) to whether or not governments are just or tyrranical.