The article mentions how this would allow all kinds of new services:
>Our European companies, large and small, will also benefit from this digital identity. They will be able to offer a wide range of new services since the proposal offers a solution for secure and trusted identification services.
It mentions things like going to nightclubs, and I assume it will include many more things that would otherwise not require a mobile app. Because this all now goes through government controlled servers, it follows they will have knowledge of all these new services, and all this new activity on every single citizen. In practice, this means government will know much more because this is now a widespread, mandatory form of ID.
The question for me is, why does government need all of this information, as oppose to how can government intervene and make ID verification more convenient. The scale of this is unprecedented as well, from the amount of people doing it to the granularity of where and how it's going to be used.
Your own example proves how digital ID can be more private and secure. You go to a nightclub, you look a bit younger, person on the entrance asks proof of your age:
Option 1 - You give him your ID card and you expose a wealth of data, including your full name, address and SSN/OIB to that person
Option 2 - He scans your phone app, gets a big green mark which proves your exact age, or even just that you are 18+ and nothing more
Option 1: one guy gets to see all of your ID data, but most likely won't keep a record of it and will forget all he saw within 10 seconds.
Option 2: the same guy has no idea who you are. Instead: your ID gets scanned, the scan hits a government server for verification. A record is now kept forever of where you went, when and with whom and this information is added to create a profile of you (and your friends/partners). They can know if you were cheating on your partner, whether you where dating, if you went out "with the boys" that night, what political flavor the people you party with prefer, and so on and so forth.
100's of people and algorithms can access these records in the future in secret, including: the NSA (even if you're European, all secret service data is shared with the NSA), local secret services, the police if they want access, the tax-man, any future dictator(s) that rises up and his subordinates, same for others in other countries that are friendly to him, anybody in politics interested in you for whatever reason that may develop in the future when data access rules get weaker (or remain unpoliced), and so on and so forth. Furthermore, if for whatever reason your political preference becomes unwanted in the future, you can fully automatically be banned from public life at the press of a button with 100% efficiency (this already happens in countries such as China as we speak, Canada CAN'T WAIT to have such a system as well).
I pick option 1.
It blows my mind that people don't see where this is going after Snowden.
> It blows my mind that people don't see where this is going after Snowden.
The majority may actually approves it, instead of turning a blind eye. During the covid crisis, how much of the population was ok with the government (taking France as example here) excluding from social life, and in some case professional life, 10% of people, on the ground of them not pumping Pfizer et al. stock price? I bet on something like 70%. Those people think because there are in the "winner" side they'll always stay there, and don't realize how fast the wind turns, and the same method will apply to them soon for whatever reason.
I don't think the majority approves of it at all. Most were just to weak to speak out. There were massive protests in many cities, but this was not reported at all by the mainstream media. Meanwhile in the UK they reported on a handful of eco protestors gluing themselves to the road. Subsequently the government used that as justification for bringing in more anti-protest laws.
Similar with Johhny Depp and Amber Herd trial being heavily publicized, while they were silent on the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. Whoever said that the mainstream media are the enemy of the people are correct.
Increasingly, in the US, bars and stores swipe your DL to validate your age. This is in the name of making sure the id was checked and not requiring the bouncer/clerk to recognize all sorts of state IDs.
Really, all the info goes to the establishment and/or the company providing the reader.
The old fashioned “bouncer will forget all the info” doesn’t apply any more.
privacy forums were recommending people run magnets over the stripes on id’s at least 10 years ago when companies started swiping them.
is the new digital id terrifying? probably. but honestly from a privacy perspective, the way companies and government working together suck up all of our digital movements is terrifying if privacy matters at all to us.
to me, this was an obvious next step considering the world we’ve decided to build. we’re doing this. government employees. corporation employees.
we’re allowing power to consolidate at a rapid pace. we can’t decimate the separation of governments and companies, then build company after company after company which heavily rely on human data for their profits, and then simultaneously be shocked when this happens.
either we have privacy from both governments and companies or we don’t. particularly in a world where we refuse to hold power to any sort of reasonable standards (and by “power” i mean governments, corporations, wealthy individuals, individuals with power backing them, organizations, etc…)
i guess my ramble really boils down to this: many of us on this exact forum are building the tools. many of us on this forum are directly enabling power of all kinds to consolidate. it isn’t clear to me how we can complain about it too.
Know exactly who is using your venue, using ID card scanner technology to find out if an ID is genuine in a matter of seconds.
Scanner has operated in every major city in the UK since 2003
Plus you will have an EU digital ID just like your credit card soon. I already have a biometric passport. Checking it is way faster than checking an ID. In Bergamo they had separate priority queues for biometric passports.
I have my Florida drivers license scanned (barcode on the back) every time I purchase alcohol at Publix or ABC Fine Spirits. I’ve also had it scanned at bars.
We proposed a way of doing option 2 with the green checkmark without hitting a server and with your private info encrypted on a device you own and it doesn’t leave the device unencrypted unless you approve parts of it; for instance passing your address for buying a house. But of course we are not Thales so it was not chosen.
It reminds me of a section from the gulag archipelago where the KGB would accuse you by taking a picture of you with someone who was thought to be a spy because they were seen with someone accused of being a spy by someone who was accused of being a spy. They came in with circumstantial evidence to take people away.
Follow anyone for long enough and they will look guilty of something. And with the 1000s of laws, does anyone think they won't break one?
Right so there you just say, "As long as you didn't give them the picture of us together." And that stops the bullshit just enough for the next sentence: "If you want cheap labor just tell me where to sign to be exploited, a real communist wants to be exploited to understand it first hand." Look the guy in the eye, as long as it takes. Four minutes at least. He'll tell you..."you know..." and then he will either desist, because under the right circumstances he must, or he will put you in for ten years.
> your ID gets scanned, the scan hits a government server for verification.
I mean, you're already assuming things work a certain way that is not necessarily true. The ID card could just have all the information stored and signed by the govt. Then a scanner would only have to check that the signature is valid, no need to actually ping the govt server.
I haven't checked the technical details, so I've got no clue. But this is how the EU COVID-19 vaccine verification works IIRC. No pinging of a central server is ever done - the mobile app just checks that the message in the QR code is properly signed with the expected root of trust.
Until the next time there is a terrorist attack or other scary event, and the opportunistic politicians say "We could have stopped this if only we had been keeping these pings in a database, just like we keep logs of everyone's internet metadata[0]. Don't worry, the database would only be looked at by AI, so it's not even a breach of your privacy."
Then everyone is just a single firmware update away from a completely different regime, and it's too late to boycott the app because everyone assumes you have it and requires you to run the latest version. Of course, you could always try protesting, but you might not get very far.[1]
Not to mention the fact that they will find a lame excuse to roll this into the credit score system sooner or later, so they can know if you are a "responsible" citizen or something.
And also that government employees are incompenent so they'll send the entire thing through wetransfer or something and it'll be leaked sooner or later.
Option 2 has all the problems from Option 1 multiplied.
Bouncer can ask for more information and you can't even lie about it. Asking for phone number and address is somewhat reasonable in our current dystopic present on the basis of KYC and "what if there's an emergency". And you can be sure that the data will be stored in local DB with poor oversight and security and it will be used for marketing and eventually leaked.
The question here is whether option 2 is implemented on the edge device (which in turn makes it more likely that someone can steal your identity) or goes over a government owned server (which means the government could soy on you)
I think "private and secure" mean two different things here. It may be private and secure from malicious actors trying to steal your ID, but it's probably not private or secure when government decides it needs to coerce you into doing something you don't want to do.
Option 2 is more convenient, but at what cost? I would think the probabilities of the cost being high is proportional to the probability that government will have corruption and abuse the system, which seems high in history and even today in many countries.
> Because this all now goes through government controlled servers, it follows they will have knowledge of all these new services, and all this new activity on every single citizen.
If only the government will have access to this data it will definitely be an improvement compared to the current situation where everybody ( Google, FB, MS, Apple, dark web, Cloudfare, government) has acces to your data, only you don't.
Historically money was not controlled by any government (gold). Gold lasted for tens of thousands of years: private transactions with money whose value was beyond a single government control.
Now we are talking about a single non-elected EU government controlling every transaction, not just the issuance of fiat money.
I personally think that with time this will implode, because the society always evolves towards more freedom, towards less centralization. There are multiple steps now in the reverse direction. However the discrepancy between the views of the government, the ruling classes and the reality is becoming so big that without a grand catastrophe (a global war, a revolution, etc) the inevitable correction seems less and less possible.
I just don't see how you can say society always evolves towards more freedom and less centralization.
I would say the total opposite. The natural equilibrium is no freedom and complete centralization but we have just been in a far from equilibrium state recently.
I imagine over the next 100 years "freedom" will be completely redefined. It was only 40 years ago in the US that you could go to a bar, get incredibly drunk and then drive home without a seat belt. This was normal behavior that is now 100% illegal. It is hard for me to imagine a future that doesn't look like modern day China but with monitoring of blood and brain states as well. Society has already spoken that we will trade freedom for safety. With pooling resources for health insurance we are going to have to know collectively about early warning signs in your blood once possible in order to keep us all safe.
We are going to have to monitor your brain state once possible for early warning signs of people becoming unhinged to keep us all safe.
I mean you don't have the freedom to travel west and claim 160 acres of land anymore. It wasn't that long ago people had that freedom but it is laughable by today's standards. I think this is how people in the future will feel about total surveillance because that is kind of how it is now anyway.
I upvoted you, but you are talking about smaller time scales. In Rome, between 15% and 35% were hereditary slaves. Then for a thousand years, the majority of the European population were serfs (freer than slaves). In the last 150 years, most people in Europe and in the US are able to choose their own jobs. That's the transition I am talking about. I think the fiat money and current war on free enterprise will ultimately end with a regime change.
In addition: From a users perspective having one account for reddit which replaces x accounts for specialized forums makes things easier such as managing notifications, etc.
> From a users perspective having one account for reddit which replaces x accounts for specialized forums makes things easier such as managing notifications, etc.
Forum platforms could offer the same feature by interoperating with the Fediverse. You can sign up on one server and use that one identity to post content elsewhere. (Plus it also addresses the issue of needing a mobile native UX, there's plenty of apps that can interact with the Fediverse.)
Notifications are just one aspect. As mentioned by others discoverability is another. An independent forum has to compete with commercial sites and well the entire www regarding search engine placement to be found.
That said, a lot of communities seem to be migrating to Discord as well, which has a discoverability many times worse than forums, as Discord 'servers' are not even publicly accessible.
> If you were an infection that wanted to survive and spread as far as possible, you wouldn't want to kill your host at all.
You may be oversimplifying here... consider that the host has an immune system and the infection has a limited time to either live in the host or to kill the host and remain in an infectious corpse for a while longer afterward.
I mean, somehow toxoplasma seems to not be caught by the immune system, so presumably they can evolve this way. If you don't directly harm the host, and maybe even benefit it, its immune system would have bigger fish to fry than going after you, no?
As to corpses, fair enough. Ah, if only these infections caught up that humans don't often just leave bodies around...
I've heard of this indicator from back in 2008. I guess it applies to cities with major stock exchanges where lots of traders/bankers go.
It's probably too early to take this indicator too seriously considering the slump in stocks and the events in crypto. But that doesn't mean it should be disregarded either.
> This doesn’t sit well with me at all. Apple should have every right to create a closed system if they want.
I disagree. In general a company should have the right to create a closed system sure. But if said company is this huge and essentially shapes a large part of digital society then the representatives of the people (it's governments) should take action to shape it in the interest of their populations. Now if that's what's happening I cannot say. Perhaps it is more like you describe it:
> All I see is lazy, half baked ideas and petty bureaucracy.
Same on my desktop with Chrome, Firefox and Edge as well as on my Android device (Firefox, DuckDuckGo-Browser).
I can see the text shortly while the page is still loading.
With third party recruiters there can be many reasons (in another comment i mentioned some). But if it's a third party recruiter then this seems to be a pattern... find someone new.
[edit]: If you don't trust them. It might also be advisable to ask your data be deleted and recend permission of them sending your cv, name or other data to companies.
Are you saying you've experienced this or know people who have?
Personally I have not experienced this or know anyone who has (I'm in EU if it matters).
In response to the original post: In each case you refer to a recruiter. Is this an external recruiter (and always the same one) or an HR person at the company you wish to work for?
If it is (an external recruiter) then I can imagine it being something that has little to do with you (Maybe the recruiter is requesting advance payment or unreasonable amounts, demanding all further communication go through them to ensure they get paid/have evidence of having "recruited" you, have terms that say they get paid if an interview takes place or whatever).
If that is not the case it seems odd to me that you wouldn't simply get some kind of message along the lines of:
"We are sorry for your inconvenience but we have already filled the position in question. The interview will no longer be necessary."
I think trying out the lifestyle/budget that you would expect is good advice.
At the same time you would be building up a financial buffer.
If you're already spending below your means then you may want to contemplate what value money has to you and/or what you want out of it in the long run. Maybe it's a social status thing, maybe you have practical goals like buying/paying off a house.
A financial plan can help to see what you need/want and how much money/stocks etc. your saving without the intent to spend it. To me personally if I have money that I don't see myself spending it's value (my personal evaluation) goes down significantly.
For example: I earn significantly less than $100k a year. Doesnt stop me from spending $200 on a dinner for two at a french restaurant. I can't do this every week - but I wouldnt want to. That wouldnt feel special. These $200 are above my usual expenditures and would potentially be over $1000 when I retire if invested properly... and yet I believe it's worth it.
If you scroll down there's a table 32.7 about Projects in China. A number of which, according to that table, are completed.