Hey mom, I just found government mole inside of Financial times!
Guy from the article claims that data such us: my age, criminal past, my home address, my disabilities etc. are totally fine to be collected and JOIN'ed together for just verification purposes. SCARY
It fundamentally doesn't understand tokenisation. It claims that you could have an age verification token that doesn't reveal to the government what you were trying to view, but how would that work? The site receiving the token still has to cryptographically validate it as being genuine, and having not being revoked, so it will still need to ask the government database (giving the government an instant kill switch against sexual minorities it decides it doesn't like into the bargain). There's no anonymisation here (and bluntly the government doesn't want that).
It's defence against a government using it for nefarious purposes is literally just the defeatist argument it decries as a fallacy in the paragraph before. Ultimately the best defence against such a government is that the harm it wants to cause can be made slow, expensive and inefficient, and that is a very good way to discourage governments from doing things en masse. But with a single identifier and digital ID it becomes far more efficient.
Hey mom, I just found government mole inside of Financial times!
Guy from the article claims that data such us: my age, criminal past, my home address, my disabilities etc. are totally fine to be collected and JOIN'ed together for just verification purposes. SCARY
A fairly poor piece.
It fundamentally doesn't understand tokenisation. It claims that you could have an age verification token that doesn't reveal to the government what you were trying to view, but how would that work? The site receiving the token still has to cryptographically validate it as being genuine, and having not being revoked, so it will still need to ask the government database (giving the government an instant kill switch against sexual minorities it decides it doesn't like into the bargain). There's no anonymisation here (and bluntly the government doesn't want that).
It's defence against a government using it for nefarious purposes is literally just the defeatist argument it decries as a fallacy in the paragraph before. Ultimately the best defence against such a government is that the harm it wants to cause can be made slow, expensive and inefficient, and that is a very good way to discourage governments from doing things en masse. But with a single identifier and digital ID it becomes far more efficient.