Digital Identities

Too Many Questions – NO ANSWERS

OK answer these questions:

  • How do you get into your car when the battery in the key goes flat?
  • How are you going to buy food when your phone battery goes flat?
  • How are you going to buy food when their is a power failure?
  • What if you drop your phone on the way to the supermarket?
  • What if you can’t afford a phone?
  • What if your government does not like what you have said and asks the bank to block access to your bank account, or your phone? (Serene Teffaha – Commonwealth Bank – Australia, Truck drivers during protest – Canada)
  • What if the databases that store this information are stolen, or lost in a data breach, similar to what has happened in 2022 with Optus and the New South Wales government, in Australia during Covid? This NSW government proudly discloses the number of data breaches and from the list displayed, you can see that government bodies are least competent at storage of confidential information and many large financial institutions are not much better. The magnitude of these breaches is not trivial, Optus lost 2.5 Million customer confidential records, while the NSW government is admitting to 100,000 confidential records.
  • What if the computer program that manages your digital identification has a programming error?
  • What if you try to make a purchase and the EFTPOS terminal says “transaction declined”? (In 2023 in Australia, this is what happens: Ring bank -> get redirected to chat bot -> get requested for ID -> get told to ring bank as the problem cannot be solved by chat bot, repeat! If the Digital ID is implemented in 2024, this scenario would go like this: Try to ring bank -> phone disconnected -> borrow phone -> internet down -> wait -> go to shop -> can’t prove ID -> no food, sorry!)
  • What if you cannot access the Internet at all, due to lack of signal, bad weather, or system failure. What a naive assumption it is, to assume that the Internet will always be available everywhere. Optus showed us that a network failure can shut an entire network down for 13 hours in a whole country.

No Country Needs Digital IDs – Ever!

I cannot believe that anybody would still think that a Digital ID is a good idea. When you look at the scenarios above, the same issues arise if we no longer had physical currencies. When presented with the arguments for implementing such a scheme, none of these common scenarios are considered. Just like most of the “sweet” offerings in 2023, this appears to be driven by selling it as convenient, safe and secure. The evidence suggests that none of these adjectives can be applied to the technologies solutions available today. (I know, the conspiracy theorists would hang there hat on central control, but we know from China, that that can never happen.)

Citizens Need To Act Today

We have already seen “government” initiated DigitalID schemes being introduced in Australia and the UK. On the surface it presented as voluntary, but in practice it is akin to the social credit system in China. “If you don’t sign up and us it, you can’t do this, and this….”

Both the UK and Australian governments have now taken an even more draconian approach, by forcing children and adults to prove their identity in order to fully access the internet, calling it an age verification requirement.

This really is the thin edge of wedge. If we don’t reject this at every opportunity, the internet as we know it, will be effectively blocked to the public. Goods and services will be allocated to only those who behave. Information will be filtered and restricted based on political ideologies and young people will never know what is really happening in the world.