Similarly with digital payments, I'd much rather trust the government with that than some rando cryptobro of the week.
There is nothing extreme about this. The government already does both functions in the analog world. It's about time they caught up digitally.
Meanwhile some YouTuber screeching about some Bible quote... not a convincing start
Edit: didn't downvote you btw, just don't agree that this is a bad thing
And reintroduce all the chilling effects of knowing everything you say is on a permanent record linked to your name. I know the government wouldn't be running the sites, but they'd have activity metadata, and data breaches could be correlated to work out who the "opaque" ID refers to (perhaps it would be possible to mitigate that by having the IdP identify users to the site as a hash combining the site and the user. Not sure). There are a few types of companies that may have a genuine reason for requiring government auth, but generally we should not make it easy for Facebook or Google to require it
A community with fewer bots and trolls should be accomplished with moderation, and not just allowing a firehose of signups
Ideally, the government login/auth would be an opt-in for sites where anonymity isn't important. Facebook, for example, already has a real-name policy but still has fake accounts. Moderation alone isn't sufficient; it's hard to keep up with the number of bad actors. Limiting signups to verified humans, and possibly validating their nationality, can help with that IRT to bots and foreign agents.
It's important that the mechanism be opt-in, though, and yeah, metadata would be a problem. But realistically it's just a matter of degree... they already have access to all of that metadata today with just a subpoena or national security letter. Centralizing the login would make it easier for them to collect it, but also make it easier to audit via government mechanisms (FOIAs, etc.) compared to the opacity of private companies (which are under zero obligation to reveal how things are stored).
What makes this tradeoff (of convenience vs privacy) acceptable to me is not that I trust the government, but that I already accept I have near-zero privacy right now, as it is. Making it slightly easier for them isn't a big deal. I'm not a very exciting person to begin with.
And frankly I suspect that outside of techno-libertarian echo chambers, this is the case for most regular people. They just don't really care if the government knows about them. Not everyone has the same degree of desire/need for privacy.
In legal circles, for example, there's the refrain that you should never share unnecessary information with police, even if you're well intentioned and have nothing to hide, because innocence isn't a preclusion from being royally fucked in court. It's true that "the government" as a homogenous blob has mountains of information on you, but I guess I'm not so eager to dissolve what few helpful divisions within that blob exist.
On the whole though I agree that my information existing somewhere in that blob isn't the hugest deal.
I would be 100% unwilling to engage with public online communities if I had to reveal my real-world identity to do so.
The hope is not that it would kill anonymity altogether, but that it would create some alternative communities linked to real-world identities, and maybe that would help people behave better, with real-world decorum, in those specific identities. Yeah, some people would never sign up for those... and maybe that's OK, as long as the remaining community is more civil and thoughtful?
I don't think that would be the result, really, because when sites do have real identity requirements, it doesn't increase civility much, if any.
I think it's the absence of a physical presence that makes people feel OK with being less civil. Emotionally, it doesn't feel like you're talking with real people.
But I don't know.
This kind of already exists: https://login.gov
I have to use this to login to the VA.
I can vote for Parliament I can't vote for PayPal's board of directors.
Most politicians back it, so voting differently makes little difference. Labour and the Conservatives support the Online Safety Bill, the Patriot Act was bipartisan, and voters have very little control over the EU and can’t stop Chat Control. And most of “government” isn’t directly elected: you can’t vote out the NSA, and Congress has little power over them either. The government blunts corporate abuses but doesn’t stop them: revolving doors ensure authorities target small fry while big companies like Visa keep going unimpeded. And finally, most voters don’t mind surveillance that much, since government and media manufacture consent for it. Don’t count on ordinary people to “vote it out” until it’s too late.
Lobbying against government surveillance helps marginally, but it's an eternal struggle. Governments take as much power as they can get, while abuses are exponentially harder to detect and stop than refusing to grant that power in the first place. The “slippery slope” isn’t a fallacy, it’s the record of the last twenty years. Don’t let them track speech and money with a central ID and digital currency, just because you don’t like a few tech bros or online trolls.
Ditching Google is not the same thing as removing Google from governance of your life, though. I don't use Google search, but I am sure they know who I am and sell that data to anyone who wants it, including government agencies which can't legally obtain that data on their own due (ostensibly) to citizen oversight.
However, the average person at least has some teeny tiny say in government via democratic processes and oversights. They have zero power against a big company unless they are a major shareholder.
The fundamental difference of "one person, one vote" and "one dollar, one vote" should not be lost in this discussion.
Big bureaucracies are terribly disempowering no matter who runs them, but in government at least you have some tiny amount of representation vs zero in the private sector.
Taxes? So I get some roads and schools and parks and old people healthcare, and lose some to corruption. Better that than making Bezos and Zucky even richer.
Why do you lie when it takes 1 second to verify the facts? I wasn't interested, but clicked on the video and the man is talking in a calm and collected manner, not even close to "screeching". Or is it always "screeching" when somebody says something you disagree with?
