
Ask HN: Should governments become identity providers - mathieubordere
Is it a government&#x27;s job to supply their civilians with e.g. official email addresses? And linked to that, should governments provide services to verify the identity of their civilians to external parties (instead of external parties verifying identities)
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shoo
Here's a different take on it: in my country, the government is already
roughly an identity provider -- drivers licenses, passports and birth
certificates are commonly required as identification when signing up for
things like rental agreements, jobs, bank accounts, etc. These are issued by
state or federal government.

Yes, this isn't implemented as something you can integrate with over the
internet using SAML 2.0 or oauth or whatever, but it still happens with much
older tech (writing + paper + anti-counterfeiting tricks + bureaucracy).

James C. Scott's book "Seeing Like a State" makes a pretty good argument that
the state wants to arrange society in such a way that it is legible and
tractable to central bureaucracy in such a way that the state can efficiently
pursue the state's goals -- collecting taxes or crushing political dissent or
so on.

So separately from if the state "should" do it, or if it is a "good idea" or
not, the state will do it if they think it will help the state achieve its
aims, and the population or some other powerful party doesn't resist it.

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marenkay
I dare to say the right question to ask is a different one:

When does something officially become recognised infrastructure?

Streets, power supply, water, and now we are actually facing the question if
the internet should be part of the default infrastructure we expect.

This poses several questions and issues, such as identity but also e.g.
storage of data. Think of all the SaaS products, and what happens if they go
out of business.

What happens to your data? In a more broader view this means, who owns the
data? You, the provider, the state, nobody?

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mchannon
Whether a government should or not is an argument that will probably not be
settled anytime soon- not a whole lot of data yet to bolster either side.

But Estonia, through e-Residency and other initiatives, is largely trying
exactly that. They've met with some failures and some successes. Human beings
are still pretty new at this "government" thing.

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mankash666
Neither a government, nor a private company make the ideal issuer of
identities. The only trusted person for issuing and updating your Identity is
you.

Please Google/wiki self-sovereign-Identity.

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segmondy
No, they can easily masquerade as you to get access to your data. In the real
world they can't send someone to pretend to be you, but digitally? It's too
easy.

